Why did Stanton model her Declaration of Sentiments on the Declaration of Independence compare and contrast documents?

Editor’s Note, July 20, 2020: This article has been updated in anticipation of the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which granted women suffrage. Read more about the the Seneca Falls Convention here.

In June 2016, as Hillary Clinton became the first woman from a major party to win enough delegates to secure the nomination, the former Secretary of State made mention of another consequential moment in women's political history: the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments. “A small but determined group of women, and men, came together with the idea that women deserved equal rights,” she said. “It was the first time in human history that that kind of declaration occurred."

Why would a potential President name-drop a 168-year-old document? Here’s what you should know about the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions that was passed at the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights:

It has its roots in a dispute over seating

Strangely enough, the struggle for women’s rights and, eventually, women’s suffrage in America began with a blowup over seating. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott met when they were whisked off to a roped-off, women’s-only seating section at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention. The convention had been thrown into chaos at the news that American women intended to vote, serve on committees and even speak at the convention, and in response they were shunted off to a section that was out of the view of men. Irate at their treatment, Stanton and Mott began to plot a convention of their own—this time, to address the state of women.

It turns out that seating is still a hotly contested issue in politics. Each year, the State of the Union address leads to disputes and strange customs over who sits where—and all eyes are on who the current First Lady chooses to sit in her special viewing box. Both political conventions also generate plenty of press on their seating chart each year; in 2008, for example, the Democratic Party drew attention for giving swing state delegates the best seats at the Denver convention.

It was based on the Declaration of Independence...

The convention that followed was groundbreaking. More than 300 women and men from abolitionist, Quaker and reform circles attended the two-day Seneca Falls Convention, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton read a document that set out the group’s agenda. It was directly based on the Declaration of Independence—a convenient format and a bold statement on the equality of women.

The Declaration wasn’t the first document on women’s rights to model itself on the Declaration; as Judith Wellman writes for The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, arguments based on the Declaration had been used to argue for property rights for married women in New York for several years before the convention. Swayed by the familiar language of America’s founding document—and with the help of many of the women present at the convention—New York passed its first law granting married women the right to own property in 1848.

…and wasn’t only signed by women.

Women drafted the Declaration, but they weren’t the only one to argue on its merits and eventually sign it. The final copy was signed by 68 women and 32 men, many of whom were the husbands or family members of women present. Frederick Douglass, however, was not; the famous, once-enslaved abolitionist was involved in the women’s rights movement until the movement nearly fell apart over questions about whether African-American men should have the right to vote.

In 1867, Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth and some other women opposed the 15th Amendment, claiming that women should take precedence over formerly enslaved people. They went in one direction; Douglass and women like Lucy Stone went another. Ironically, even when women did gain the right to vote in 1920, women of color were largely precluded from voting by racist local laws until enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Not everyone present thought the Declaration should include a call for suffrage

The Declaration of Sentiments and the resolutions adopted by the Seneca Falls Convention is hailed for its groundbreaking demands—like insisting that men be held to the same moral standards as women and holding that anti-woman laws have no authority. But it’s just as noteworthy for what it almost didn’t demand: voting rights for women. Though a resolution for suffrage was eventually adopted, it was not unanimously supported. Only after an impassioned speech by Frederick Douglass did attendees decide to go for it, giving the document its most incendiary demand. That insistence on suffrage was not popular: Convention attendees were mocked and harassed and the Declaration was called ludicrous. Though only one of its signers was alive when the 19th Amendment was signed, it set the wheels of women’s suffrage in motion.

Bad news: Nobody can find the original

Given everything the document sparked—and its importance to women’s history in the United States, you’d think that the convention’s Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions would be safe in the National Archives. You’d be wrong: The document has somehow gone missing.

As Megan Smith writes for the White House's official blog, the closest thing to an original in the National Archives is a printed copy made by Frederick Douglass in his print shop after the convention. The notes that he used to make his copy—minutes from the meeting that would constitute the original—are gone. Do you know where the document could be? You can use the hashtag #FindTheSentiments to help with the hunt for one of America’s most important documents.

Read the full text here: https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/declaration-of-sentiments.htm

During the summer of 1848 abolitionist Lucretia Mott left her home in Philadelphia and headed for upstate New York to attend a Quaker meeting and visit her pregnant sister, Martha Coffin Wright. While in the area, both Mott and Wright attended a tea party in Seneca Falls. Their friend Jane Hunt hosted the party. Invitations were also extended to Hunt’s neighbors, Mary Ann M’Clintock and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. By the end of the tea, the group was planning a meeting for women’s rights. They published a notice in local papers reporting: “a Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religions condition of women.”[1] Elizabeth Cady Stanton volunteered to write an outline for their protest statement, calling it a Declaration of Sentiments. Stanton and M’Clintock, then, drafted the document, from M’Clintock’s mahogany tea table. The Declaration of Sentiments set the stage for their convening.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton voiced the claims of the antebellum-era conventioneers at Seneca Falls by adopting the same language of colonial revolutionaries, decades prior. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was her template. Historian Linda Kerber perhaps best explains the significance of Stanton’s rhetorical decision, writing: “By tying the complaints of women to the most distinguished political statement the nation had made [Stanton] implied that women’s demands were no more or less radical than the American Revolution had been; that they were in fact an implicit fulfillment of the commitments already made.”[2]

The Declaration of Sentiments was a clarion call in celebration of women’s worthiness—naming their right not be subjugated. Most prominent among the critiques Stanton advanced were: women’s inferior legal status, including lack of suffrage rights (which was true except both for some local elections and in New Jersey between 1790 and 1807); economic as well as physical subordination; and limited opportunities for divorce (including lack of child custody protections). These offences were particularly ironic considering the expansive civic wartime roles women performed, including their contributions to the nation’s independence—by working as nurses and cooks, spies, and, even, fundraisers.[3]

Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments to dramatize the denied citizenship claims of elite women during a period when the early republic’s founding documents privileged white propertied males. The document has long been recognized for the sharp critique she made of gender inequality in the U.S. Yet, her words also obscured significant differences in the lived experiences of women across racial, class, and regional lines. For example, at the very moment Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, Native Americans were being displaced to create space for westward expansion. This does not mean they had no relationship to the women’s rights movement. Rather, matrilineal Native societies inspired women’s rights advocates who referenced them in order to claim that women in the U.S. deserved greater autonomy.[4] Additionally, African Americans in New York were but a mere generation removed from slavery. There were black women advocates of the women’s rights movement, but there is no evidence that they were invited to Seneca Falls.[5] Frederick Douglass played a prominent role in the proceedings. Making clear these distinctions creates a space to better understand both the inequalities that existed between women at the time of Stanton’s call for women’s rights and the intellectual tensions that existed in the movement during some of its earliest days. Yet, the Declaration of Sentiments as an idea created an important space for articulating the rights owed to women, one embraced by many now in a larger project of gender equality.

----“Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention,” Journal of Women's History, 3: 1 (Spring 1991), 9-37.

Judith Wellman, Road to Seneca Falls (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 226; Judith Wellman, “Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention,” Journal of Women's History, 3: 1 (Spring 1991), 9-37.

Linda K. Kerber, “From the Declaration of Independence to the Declaration of Sentiments: The Legal Status of Women in the Early Republic, 1776-1848,” Human Rights 6, No. 2 (Winter 1977): 115.

See: Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999).

See: Lori D. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Women’s Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Sally Roesch Wagner, Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists (New York: Native Voices, 2001).

See: Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) and Lisa Tretrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 133-135.