Okay, it’s Saturday, and I have a lot planned with the move today, so I won’t be around much. BUT!
I’ve got a little surprise for you tonight. Watch for it here and across the Pumasphere* tonight around 8 PM. And I think you are going to LOVE it. I know I do already. UPDATE!! I’m late. They went LIVE with announcement I alluded to earlier. The revised Declaration is going NATIONAL! Be a part! More info here.
Pumasphere is still a cool term though.
All that said, because of my time constraints today, and in preparation for the big announcement tonight, I’ve decided to cross post the factual twin to yesterday’s post. Originally posted at dKos to celebrate Women’s History Month in March, this is the story of the birth of the First Wave. What happened in its wake is just as interesting, and I may take the opportunity of these anniversaries to share with you over the next six weeks some of what fills my head. I have all the stories there, cataloged and numbered like a miniature American Women’s History library. So, without further ado:
Backstory: The Birth of the First Wave
The 19th Century is widely considered a tumultuous period of political involvement and change. It seems in hindsight as if that drive our forefathers had to couch their rebellion in the concept of equality had everyone wanting a piece of that pie. In addition to abolition movements in the North and South, the concept of women’s equality began to emerge in the 19th century as well.
The idea of Seneca Falls was actually hatched at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London. While abolition was, by this time, a world-wide movement, apparently the American movement was a bit more enlightened than the European version, as the convention refused to seat female representatives duly elected in the States. They were consigned to a balcony, and given no opportunity to participate in either discussion or decisions. Two of those women were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, who met at this convention. Stanton was also on her honeymoon (now THAT’S dedication to a cause). The two women commiserated in the balcony, and vowed that one day women would have a convention to fight for equality themselves. Eight years later, at a tea party at the home of Jane and Richard Hunt, they would renewed their friendship, and take up their vow.
Elizabeth Cady and Harriot Stanton (Yes, the one who gave us our opening quote for the 19th Amendment post.)
Lucretia Mott
July 1848
Though the Seneca Falls Convention on Women’s Rights kicked off the first wave of American feminism, it was nearly an impossible feat. Stanton and Mott only reconnected around July 10th, and they staged the convention at local Wesleyan Chapel little more than a week later, July 19th & 20th. They announced their intentions via the Seneca County Courier on July 16th as a “convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” Because they thought the move was bold enough to warrant attack, they scheduled the first day for women only, inviting men to participate on the second day. However, many men did show up on that first day and they were not turned away, nor did they heckle or try to disrupt. Most were supportive of the effort, and many were among the 100 signers of the document issued by the convention, The Declaration of Sentiments.
Wesleyan Chapel today, on the site of the Women’s Rights National Historic Park in Seneca Falls
Declaration of Sentiments
Some of the words had already been written 72 years earlier in the Declaration of Independence. Those words were so powerful and true that they almost begged to be employed to a larger end than designed. The first paragraph differs because the aim is different. Rather than trying to disentangle from a distant tyranny, the signers of the Declaration of Sentiments sought to join a group with others in a show of that equality that was the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. To that most famous of lines, a single word was added—-women.
We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
And as the Declaration of Independence ends with a long list of wrongs to be righted, so did the Declaration of Sentiments have its resolutions. While all of them are of note in the context of the time, I point to these two as my personal favorites:
Resolved, That woman is man’s equal—was intended to be so by the Creator, and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such.
***
Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.
The first was not the reality then, and is not even the reality now, though we have come a long way since 1848. That it’s still not true is part of what drives this movement–the continued fight for equality, true equality. The second is the truth and heart of the matter-—it did take women working together, as they had in the Seneca Falls Convention, to a single end, for many women to the exclusion of all else, as well as another 72 years to bring the second resolution to fruition. Women in America today enjoy so many of the freedoms that they do, including the right to vote for any candidate they choose, because of the long fight born at this historic event.
***
Only one woman in attendance at Seneca Falls in 1848, one of the signers of the Declaration of Sentiments, Charlotte Woodward (Pierce), lived to see the 19th Amendment ratified.
*Yes, I did just coin that phrase. Feel free to use it. 
