[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 why the
follow-up convention was so important, and two of its more groundbreaking
details.
In that
weeklong blog series hyperlinked in my intro above (and again
here, ‘cause why not?), I highlighted the October 1850 Women’s Rights
Convention in Worcester, the first to bill itself as national and certainly an
important step into a more widespread movement. But when it comes to follow-up
conventions to Seneca Falls, I’m not sure there could be a more significant one
than the August 2nd, 1848
Women’s Rights Convention in Rochester. Taking place just two weeks after
and less than 50 miles away from Seneca Falls, the Rochester convention was
explicitly defined as a “recovening” of the earlier one, and included for
example a formal approval of the Declaration of Rights. And I think that
interconnected but sequential nature of the two conventions was crucially
important—as I wrote in this week’s first post, the Seneca Falls Convention
came about quite informally and haphazardly, and so the follow-up in Rochester
represented a vital reflection of the fact that this was indeed the start of a more
formal series and movement.
As you’d
expect, many of the same people who had organized and run the Seneca Falls
Convention played similar roles in Rochester. But there was also a significant
difference in leadership: the Rochester Convention elected the prominent local activist
and abolitionist Abigail Bush
as its presiding officer. Bush was the first woman to preside over a
public meeting that featured men as well as women, and her election was thus
hugely controversial, with vocal opposition from fellow leaders like Lucretia
Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (who
“thought it a most hazardous experiment to have a woman President”). Bush later
recognized both the toll and the stakes of her service, noting, “When I
found that my labors were finished, my strength seemed to leave me and I cried
like a baby. But that ended the feeling with women that they must have a man to
preside at their meetings.” Indeed, I’d say that this detail alone makes the
Rochester Convention as important as the Seneca Falls one, or at least again a
vital complement that also took the women’s rights movement forward in key
ways.
Moreover,
the Rochester Convention didn’t simply approve or continue the business from
Seneca Falls—it also featured new additions to the movement’s evolving and
deepening debates and platforms. Particularly striking was the convention’s
attention to working women, both through an overt call
for equal pay for equal work and through the creation
of a Women’s Protection Union in the city to investigate and address working
women’s circumstances and concerns. Speaking for myself, it’s far too easy to
see contemporary communities and movements like these women’s rights
conventions and the efforts of the
Lowell Mill Girls to organize and fight for their rights as entirely
distinct—while of course they were separate and unique in various ways, these
details and emphases from Rochester make clear that working women’s rights
could become part of the broader women’s movement, a hugely significant layer
that this follow-up convention added into the mix.
Last
Seneca context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment