What was the 1848 seneca falls convention

Though the entire convention excluded poor women and black women, among other minorities, it was groundbreaking that women could hold this event at all.

Over 70 years after the convention in Seneca Falls, the nation ratified the 19th Amendment , which granted women the right to vote in Toggle navigation. Sign up for our email newsletter. A significant reform community emerged in western New York in the s and 40s. Among these reformers were abolitionists who joined relatives and started businesses in Seneca Falls and Waterloo. Here and elsewhere, Quaker women such as Philadelphia Lucretia Mott took an active role in the effort to end slavery.

In July they planned the convention and hammered out a formal list of grievances based on the Declaration of Independence, denouncing inequities in property rights, education, employment, religion, marriage and family, and suffrage.

The five women who organized the Seneca Falls Convention were also active in the abolitionist movement , which called for an end to slavery and racial discrimination. They included:. Stanton and Mott first met in London in , where they were attending the World Anti-Slavery Convention with their husbands.

Around the same time in New York, where Stanton lived, legal reformers had been discussing equality and challenging state laws prohibiting married women from owning property. By , equal rights for women was a divisive issue. Written primarily by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, it called on women to fight for their Constitutionally guaranteed right to equality as U.

Women were denied an education and issued an inferior role in the church. Moreover, women were required to be obedient to their husbands and prevented from owning property, including the wages they earned which technically belonged to their husbands. And they received unequal rights upon divorce. In New York and across the U. Horace Greely , the influential editor of The New York Tribune , echoed the opinion of many people at the time.

While skeptical of giving women the right to vote, he argued that if Americans really believed in the Constitution , women must attain equal rights:. However unwise and mistaken the demand, it is but the assertion of a natural right, and such must be conceded. After 72 years of organized struggle, all American women finally achieved the same rights as men at the polling box when, in , women won the right to vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.

Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions. Lucretia Mott left and Elizabeth Cady Stanton right. Photo: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. Drafted by Stanton and introduced at the Seneca Falls Convention, the Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances was a treatise modeled closely on the Declaration of Independence.

Stanton wanted U. On the second day of the convention, the Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances was ratified by the assembly which included Frederick Douglass. Photo: Kenneth C. In , a U. She reflected about these events with passion and candor:. Think about the incredible courage it must have taken to join that procession.