.......the first Women's Rights Convention in history. It was held at Seneca Falls, New York....An announcement was put in the Seneca County Courier calling for a meeting to discuss the rights of women on the 19th and 20th of July, 1840. Three hundred women and some men came. A Declaration of Principles was signed at the end of the meeting by sixty-eight women and thirty-two men. It made use of the language and rhythm of the Declaration of Independence :

"When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that they have hitherto occupied...

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness....

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world....."

Then came the list of grievances : no right to vote, no right to her wages or to property, no rights in divorce cases, no equal opportunity in employment, no entrance to colleges, ending with ; "He had endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life..."


And then a series of resolutions, including : "That all laws which prevent woman from occupying such a station in society as her conscience shall dictate, or which place her in a position inferior to that of man, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and therefore of no force or authority."

A series of women's conventions in various parts of the country followed the one at Seneca Falls. At one of these, in 1851, an aged black woman, who had been born a slave in New York, tall, thin, wearing a gray dress and white turban, listened to some male ministers who had been dominating the discussion. This was "Sojourner Truth". She rose to her feet and joined the indignation of her race to the indignation of her sex :


"That man over there says that woman needs to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches...Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles or gives me any best place. And a'ant I a woman?

Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could help me! And a'nt I a woman?

I would work as much and eat as much as a man, when I could get it, and bear the lash as well. And a'nt I a woman?

I have borne thirteen children and seen 'em most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me ! And aint I a woman?"

pps. 123-124, "The Intimately Oppressed", A PEOPLES HISTORY, Howard Zinn


[Picture Below is of women's rights activist and Abolitionist, Lucretia Coffin Mott, one of the main organizers of that first womens rights gathering in Seneca Falls, NY, on the weekend of July 19th and 20th, 1840]