The origins of women's rights movement in the United States: the Seneca Falls Convention

Abstract

In the 19th century, women had very limited or almost inexistent rights. They lived in a male dominated world where they had restricted access to many fields and they were considered to be an ornament of their husband in public life, and as a domestic agent to the interior of the family, as the Spanish contemporary expression ángel del hogar denotes. In the eyes of the law, they were civilly dead. They were considered fragile and delicate, because they were dependent on a man from birth to death. Tired of being considered less than their male companions, a women’s rights movement emerged in the small town of Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Women gathered for the first time in history at the Wesleyan Chapel to discuss women’s rights and to find a solution to the denigration they had suffered by men and society during the years. Around 300 people gathered in Seneca Falls, both men and women. As an attempt to amend the wrongs of men, these women created the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, a document based on the Declaration of Independence, expressing their discontent with how the society had treated them and asking for a change and equal rights, among which there was the right for suffrage. These women based their ideas on previous feminist influences, such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges. In fact, de Gouges’ Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen resembles to the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments created 57 years later by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Nonetheless, it was not until the 19th Amendment passed in 1992 that the United States finally granted the right to vote to women.