The First Women's Rights Convention

The Summer of 1848 was unquestionably a time of great excitement for American social reformers. In May of that year slavery was abolished on the French ruled Carribean island of Martinique. On July 3, 1848 less than two weeks before the planning of the Seneca Falls Convention, slavery was abolished in the Dutch West Indies.

Fresh from a month of missionary work on the Cattaraugus reservation of the Seneca Nation, Quakers Lucretia Coffin Mott and James Mott were staying with Lucretia Motts' sister, Martha Coffin Wright at Auburn, while attending an Annual Meeting of Friends at Junius, NY. Visiting in the home of Jane C. Hunt, in Waterloo, Stanton, Wright, Mott, and Mary Ann M'Clintock returned to the discussion of holding a convention on woman's rights that had begun between Stanton and Mott in 1840, during the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London.

There are two early published accounts of the Seneca Falls Convention. The first Report of the Woman's Rights Convention was printed soon afterward at the office of The North Star, Frederick Douglass' newspaper in Rochester. The second appeared thirty years later, in the National Citizen and Ballot Box (published by Matilda Joslyn Gage), as a draft of A History of Woman Suffarge, edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gage, and Susan B. Anthony.

The later description, which appears below, includes the text of all of the resolutions adopted at the Convention, and a more personalized account (presumably Stanton's) of those involved. It also differs from the first published account on the presence of men on the first day of the Convention, reflecting James Mott's presence in the chair, and the participation by men in discussions, throughout the proceedings.

From The National Citizen and Ballot Box, Vol.3, No. 12, Syracuse, NY, April, 1879:

The First Woman's Rights Convention, 1848

The Seneca County Courier, a semi-weekly journal, of July 14, 1848, contained the following startling announcement:

WOMAN'S RIGHTS CONVENTION!

"A Convention to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of woman, will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel, at Seneca Falls, N.Y., on Wednesday and Thursday, the 19th and 20th of July, current; commencing at 10 o'clock, A.M."

During the first day the meeting will be exclusively for women, who are earnestly invited to attend. The public generally are invited to be present on the second day, when Lucretia Mott of Philadelphia, and others, ladies and gentlemen will address the convention."

* Mott and Stanton had met at the 1840 Convention to which both Mott and Henry Stanton were delegates. After a full day's discussion, that convention refused patricipation of the women delegates, and instead seated them behind a curtain in a gallery (where they were joined throughout the succeeding ten days by William Lloyd Garrison, who had refused his seat after arriving too late to engage in the debate).