Convention aimed to alter restrictive laws, customs of 1848

In 1848 America, an unmarried woman by law or custom did not vote, speak in public, hold office, attend college or earn a living other than as a seamstress, mill worker, teacher or domestic. Married women lived under the same restrictions, but in addition, could not make contracts, sue in court, divorce an abusive husband or gain custody of their children. Nor could a married woman inherit or own property. Everything she had, including the clothes on her back, was the legal property of her husband.

Individual women had long expressed a longing for their freedom and equality under the law, but it was not until July 1848 that a handful of reformers, most of them abolitionists and Quakers from Western New York, called a convention in the Finger Lakes town of Seneca Falls to discuss the social, civil and religious conditions and rights of women.

These reformers were Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the wife of a Methodist minister, and Quaker abolitionists Jane Hunt, Mary M'Clintock, Lucretia Mott and Martha Wright. They hammered out a formal list of grievances based on the Declaration of Independence that denounced inequities in property rights, marriage and family, education, employment, religion and suffrage.

On July 19, the declaration was introduced to an audience of 300 with the words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal...." and the public battle for equal rights for American women began.

-Patricia Donovan