The Tale of Seneca Falls – the Making of a Precious Pearl

“We hold these truths to be self evident . . .that all men and women are created equal.”
Thus spoke Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the first organized women’s right convention.

This is the tale of how it began. It started with a complaint, an irritability of sorts. Very much, in fact, like how a pearl begins its journey. Pearls are formed by an irritant invading an oyster’s shell. The oyster exudes a substance to surround the irritation, and over time, layer by layer, a pearl is created.

The year was 1848. Five women, all homemakers and mothers, sat around a table having tea and they started to complain. Have you ever sat around with your friends and complained?

This day, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 33 years old, of Seneca Falls, New York, was upset about her role of housewife, while her husband was free to pursue his career and his pleasures, while she felt trapped. She was irritated about the status of women and their lack of legal rights.

Elizabeth grew up in a wealthy family, with servants and many luxuries. She received an excellent education, very unusual for a woman of her time. Her father was a lawyer, and as a child, Elizabeth loved to spend time in his office and law library.
She remembers one incident vividly when she was a child:
“. . . a woman came into my father’s law office, weeping. The woman’s husband had died, and the farm she owned with him passed on to their son, who treated the woman most unkindly. Father told her there was no legal remedy. I realized the cruelty of the laws.”
At the time, women could not inherit property. Young Elizabeth decided to get a pair of scissors and cut those laws out of her father’s statute books. Her father stopped her and explained that it would not fix the problem.

By 1848, Elizabeth had married, traveled to London, and enjoyed life in the cosmopolitan and stimulating atmosphere of Boston. She now found herself living a not so stimulating small town life in Seneca Falls. Between three small children, housework, and with her husband often away, Elizabeth was frustrated. And she complained about it at tea with her friends.

In addition to not being able to inherit property, fathers had sole custody of the children, no matter the circumstances and all women’s wages belonged to their husbands. Imagine how many men would be lining up to propose to Oprah Winfrey if this were the case today?

So, the women complained that day at tea, and this time, the complaints turned into action. The group decided to call a “convention” to discuss women’s rights. They convinced the minister of the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in Seneca Falls to let them use the church and arranged for a newspaper announcement of the event. The next day The Seneca County Courier published the call to a “convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women” on July 19-20.

The women then gathered to set the agenda and draft a document for discussion and resolutions. They decided to adopt the Declaration of Independence as their model, substituting “all men” for “King George.” They titled it, “A Declaration of Rights and Sentiments,” and in it, they demanded property rights, education, employment, and equality under the law.

Three hundred people showed up at the convention! Elizabeth spoke of the changes needed in the laws, including the right for women to keep their own wages. Sitting in the audience was Charlotte Woodard, a 19-year-old girl who made gloves at home, as it was not proper for her to work outside the home. Her father took all her wages. Woodard wrote in her diary about having her wages taken: “Every fiber of my being rebelled.”

All of women’s resolutions passed unanimously, except the one calling for voting rights. However, when former slave Fredrick Douglass presented an impassioned plea in defense of women’s voting rights, the measure passed.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the convention were roundly criticized in the press. Many thought it was a sacrilege that the Declaration of Independence had been its model.

Seventy-two years later, in 1920, American women secured the Constitutional right to vote. Charlotte Woodward, the young glove maker who attended that first women’s rights convention was legally able to vote at the age of 91.
It takes a very long time (and a lot of complaining and irritation) to make a pearl.
Our right to vote is a precious pearl – 72 years in formation.