[July 19-20 marks the 175th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. Although, as I argued in this weeklong series, our focus on Seneca Falls has overshadowed other important early conventions, it’s still a milestone moment, and this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts. Leading up to a weekend post on our 21st century movement!]
On both a delightfully
specific and an important broad layer to the Convention’s origins.
As I
imagine is the case with many significant historical moments and events, the
Seneca Falls Convention came about quite haphazardly. A large number of Quakers
(members of the Religious Society of Friends, formally) had made New York’s Seneca
County (and specifically the county capital of Waterloo) their home over
the preceding half-century, including influential Quaker families (and
abolitionists) like Thomas
and Mary Ann M’Clintock and Richard
and Jane Hunt. Perhaps no American Quaker was more famous in that era than Lucretia
Coffin Mott, the abolitionist and activist who had gained a reputation as
one of the nation’s most fiery and eloquent orators. Mott’s sister Martha
Coffin Wright lived in nearby Auburn, New York, and in the summer of 1848
Mott and her
husband James traveled to the area to visit with her sister and also to
continue their activist work on a number of local levels: with the region’s sizeable
community of formerly enslaved people; at the Auburn State
Penitentiary where Mott lectured; and on the nearby Seneca Cattaraugus
Reservation.
On Sunday,
July 9th, Mott attended a local Quaker worship and then joined a
group of these women from the area—her sister Martha, Jane Hunt, Mary Ann M’Clintock,
and her fellow activist (and the group’s only non-Quaker) Elizabeth
Cady Stanton for tea at the Hunt home. The conversation apparently and unsurprisingly
turned to the frustrating and unnecessary challenges that faced these women as
women, both in their activist work and in every other arena of their lives in
mid-century American society. They decided to take advantage of Mott’s visit and
prominence and to host a women’s rights convention, creating on the spot an
announcement that began “WOMAN’S RIGHTS CONVENTION—A Convention to discuss the
social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman” and that ran in the Seneca County Courier beginning on
July 11th. Other regional and national periodicals like Frederick
Douglass’ North Star picked up the advertisement as well,
and despite the short notice the word spread and a fair number of attendees
made it to Seneca Falls and its newly constructed Wesleyan
Methodist Chapel for the July 19-20 Convention.
I really
love how informal and intimate that origin point was, and again I think it has
a lot to tell us about how history is very often made and shaped (too often by informal
gatherings of the powerful and privileged, of course, whether in smoke-filled
rooms or otherwise; but in this case something quite different and far more
inclusive). But it’s also far from coincidental that this was a gathering of
Quakers, held at a prominent Quaker family’s home after a Quaker worship
service. Other than briefly in
this post on one of my very favorite American writers and voices, John
Woolman, I don’t think I’ve engaged nearly enough in this space with the
oversized (given the community’s numbers) and inspiring
role that Quakers have played in American activist and social movements and
progress. That certainly included both the
abolitionist and the early
women’s rights movements, the combination of which truly defined
conventions like Seneca Falls. I’m not sure any historical detail better
captures that foundational presence and influence than an afternoon tea at
which a group of determined Quaker women launched a national movement!
Next
Seneca context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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