How the Seneca Falls Convention Helped Americans

The Power of Words from Stanton, Mott and Anthony

Nov 24, 2009 Maureen Zieber

The Seneca Falls Convention was seen as the platform for women's rights. It was designed for women and people of color to have a political voice.

In America, the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 is seen as the mass movement that laid the foundation for women’s right to vote, a right that was finally ratified in 1920. From this, women all over the United States began to push for the equality of women.

These women were putting theories by Wollstonecraft into practice by creating educational institutions strictly for girls and women, such as academies, teacher training facilities, and colleges.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Seneca Falls Convention

One of the activists of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who is considered the founder of the woman’s rights movement in America. Her call to action began in London at the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, when the male delegates voted to refuse women entrance into the building as fellow speakers.

It was this act that caused Stanton to realize that the need for equality between men and women was essential if America was to be considered the land of the free. It was Stanton who promoted the vote for women and suffrage, and it was Lucretia Coffin Mott who helped Stanton bring about the Convention when they met in London.

Lucretia Mott was a Quaker, whose father believed in education for girls, and Mott embraced ideas that were preached by Mary Wollstonecraft. The Seneca Falls Convention was not only a platform for women's rights, but was expanded to include equality for African-Americans. One important face among the crowd gathered at the convention was Frederick Douglass.

Stanton and the Solitude of Self

Years later, Stanton published her ideas on marriage, divorce, and a better life for women in The Solitude of Self, where she wrote that women had to learn to fend for themselves and not feel as though they had to depend on men. She believed that for women, marriage was like incarceration, and that divorce was a way for women to gain freedom and they should be allowed to have access to it.

Divorce wouldn’t be needed, she argued, if women were educated and treated as equals. Stanton sent a personal Thank You letter to John Stuart Mill, because she said he was the first man who understood her thoughts and feelings about women in society.

The Feminist Drive of Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony’s father valued girls as much as boys, and like Mott was educated and Quaker; so was used to outspoken women. Anthony learned early that women were disabled in the legal arena. She believed that marriage was a prison sentence, and refused all offers of marriage.

Like Mott and Stanton, she was also denied entrance into London’s Anti-Slavery Convention, but it wasn’t until after the Seneca Falls Convention that they all met. Anthony dedicated herself to the issue of temperance, and joined the Rochester Daughters of Temperance, and became its president.

Stanton, Mott, and Anthony were some of the most critical players in America, because they set the tone for the women’s rights movement for generations to come.

• Brownmiller, Susan. (1999). In Our Time. New York: The Dial Press.

• Freedman, Estelle B. (2002). No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. New York: Ballantine Books.

• Gurko, Miriam. (1974). The Ladies of Seneca Falls: The Birth of the Woman’s Rights Movement. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.

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Stanton sitting, Anthony standing

Lucretia Coffin Mott