The Road to Seneca Falls

The Road to Seneca Falls
Author: Judith Wellman
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2010-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252092821

Feminists from 1848 to the present have rightly viewed the Seneca Falls convention as the birth of the women's rights movement in the United States and beyond. In The Road To Seneca Falls, Judith Wellman offers the first well documented, full-length account of this historic meeting in its contemporary context. The convention succeeded by uniting powerful elements of the antislavery movement, radical Quakers, and the campaign for legal reform under a common cause. Wellman shows that these three strands converged not only in Seneca Falls, but also in the life of women's rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It is this convergence, she argues, that foments one of the greatest rebellions of modern times. Rather than working heavy-handedly downward from their official "Declaration of Sentiments," Wellman works upward from richly detailed documentary evidence to construct a complex tapestry of causes that lay behind the convention, bringing the struggle to life. Her approach results in a satisfying combination of social, community, and reform history with individual and collective biographical elements. The Road to Seneca Falls challenges all of us to reflect on what it means to be an American trying to implement the belief that "all men and women are created equal," both then and now. A fascinating story in its own right, it is also a seminal piece of scholarship for anyone interested in history, politics, or gender.

Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement

Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement
Author: Sally McMillen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2009-09-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199758603

In a quiet town of Seneca Falls, New York, over the course of two days in July, 1848, a small group of women and men, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, held a convention that would launch the woman's rights movement and change the course of history. The implications of that remarkable convention would be felt around the world and indeed are still being felt today. In Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Woman's Rights Movement, the latest contribution to Oxford's acclaimed Pivotal Moments in American History series, Sally McMillen unpacks, for the first time, the full significance of that revolutionary convention and the enormous changes it produced. The book covers 50 years of women's activism, from 1840-1890, focusing on four extraordinary figures--Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Susan B. Anthony. McMillen tells the stories of their lives, how they came to take up the cause of women's rights, the astonishing advances they made during their lifetimes, and the lasting and transformative effects of the work they did. At the convention they asserted full equality with men, argued for greater legal rights, greater professional and education opportunities, and the right to vote--ideas considered wildly radical at the time. Indeed, looking back at the convention two years later, Anthony called it "the grandest and greatest reform of all time--and destined to be thus regarded by the future historian." In this lively and warmly written study, Sally McMillen may well be the future historian Anthony was hoping to find. A vibrant portrait of a major turning point in American women's history, and in human history, this book is essential reading for anyone wishing to fully understand the origins of the woman's rights movement.

The Myth of Seneca Falls

The Myth of Seneca Falls
Author: Lisa Tetrault
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469614278

Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898

The Ladies of Seneca Falls

The Ladies of Seneca Falls
Author: Miriam Gurko
Publisher: Pantheon
Total Pages: 354
Release: 1987-12-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0805205454

On July 13, 1848, five women conversed over tea in a small upstate New York town. The next day, the local newspaper carried their announcement inviting women to attend “A Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.″ A few days later, the American woman's right movement became reality. Miriam Gurko traces the course of the movement from its origin in the Seneca Falls Convention through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote. She examines each of the movement's founders—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and others—to show the various backgrounds from which their feminist consciousness sprang and the unique contribution that each made to the destiny of the movement. This straightforward, comprehensive history of the early years of the woman's rights movement in America is essential background reading for anyone involved with women's studies. With 34 black-and-white illustrations

Starting from Seneca Falls

Starting from Seneca Falls
Author: Karen Schwabach
Publisher: Random House Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2020-06-23
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0593125088

Celebrate the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment with another historical novel about women's suffrage from the author of The Hope Chest! Bridie's life has been a series of wrongs. The potato famine in Ireland. Being sent to the poorhouse when her mother's new job in America didn't turn out the way they'd hoped. Becoming an orphan. And then there's the latest wrong--having to work for a family so abusive that Bridie is afraid she won't survive. So she runs away to Seneca Falls, New York, which in 1848 is a bustling town full of possibility. There, she makes friends with Rose, a girl with her own list of wrongs, but with big dreams, too. Rose helps Bridie get a job with the strangest lady she's ever met, Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Mrs. Stanton is planning a convention to talk about the rights of women. For Bridie and Rose, it's a new idea, that women and girls could have a voice. But they sure are sick of all the wrongs. Maybe it's time to fight for their rights!

No Permanent Waves

No Permanent Waves
Author: Nancy A. Hewitt
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2010
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813547245

No Permanent Waves boldly enters the ongoing debates over the utility of the "wave" metaphor for capturing the complex history of women's rights by offering fresh perspectives on the diverse movements that comprise U.S. feminism, past and present. Seventeen essays--both original and reprinted--address continuities, conflicts, and transformations among women's movements in the United States from the early nineteenth century through today. A respected group of contributors from diverse generations and backgrounds argue for new chronologies, more inclusive conceptualizations of feminist agendas and participants, and fuller engagements with contestations around particular issues and practices. Race, class, and sexuality are explored within histories of women's rights and feminism as well as the cultural and intellectual currents and social and political priorities that marked movements for women's advancement and liberation. These essays question whether the concept of waves surging and receding can fully capture the complexities of U.S. feminisms and suggest models for reimagining these histories from radio waves to hip-hop.

Discourse on Woman

Discourse on Woman
Author: Lucretia Mott
Publisher:
Total Pages: 28
Release: 1850
Genre: Women's rights
ISBN:

This lecture by Mott, delivered 17 December 1849, was in response to one by an unidentified lecturer criticizing the demand for equal rights for women. She makes a very gentle appeal, here, for women's enfranchisement, placing emphasis, instead on the injustices done to women in marriage.

Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions (eBook)

Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions (eBook)
Author: Douglas M. Rife
Publisher: Lorenz Educational Press
Total Pages: 52
Release: 2002-03-01
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0787785628

In the middle of the nineteenth century women's rights became a cause for which many women were willing to fight. The Women's Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 was the first attack in a battle that would last for many years. Through an examination of the declaration written and signed at that conference and a variety of other activities, students will discover the impact of that event on their lives today. They will also gain insight by studying a suffrage campaign song and by analyzing political cartoons on the topic.

Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott

Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott
Author: Lucretia Mott
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 646
Release: 2002
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780252026744

This landmark volume makes widely available for the first time the correspondence of the Quaker activist Lucretia Coffin Mott. Scrupulously reproduced and annotated, these letters illustrate the length and breadth of her public life as a leading reformer while providing an intimate glimpse of her family life. Dedicated to reform of almost every kind--temperance, peace, equal rights, woman suffrage, nonresistance, and the abolition of slavery--Mott viewed woman's rights as only one element of a broad-based reform agenda for American society. A founder and leader of many antislavery organizations, including the racially integrated American Antislavery Society and the Philadelphia Female Anti-slavery Society, she housed fugitive slaves, maintained lifelong friendships with such African-American colleagues as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, and agitated to bring her fellow Quakers into consensus on taking a stand against slavery. Mott was a seasoned activist by 1848 when she helped to organize the Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention, whose resolutions called for equal treatment of women in all arenas. Mott tried to pursue a neutral course when her friends Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony disagreed with other woman's rights leaders over the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed equal rights for freedmen but not for any women. Her private views on this breach within the woman's movement emerge for the first time in these letters. An active public life, however, is only half the story of this dedicated and energetic woman. Mott and her husband of fifty-six years, James, raised five children to adulthood, and her letters to other reformers and fellow Quakers are interspersed with the informal "hurried scraps" she wrote to and about her cherished family. An invaluable resource on an extraordinary woman, these selected letters reveal the incisive mind, clear sense of mission, and level-headed personality that made Lucretia Coffin Mott a natural leader and a major force in nineteenth-century American life.

Untidy Origins

Untidy Origins
Author: Lori D. Ginzberg
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2006-03-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807876364

On a summer day in 1846--two years before the Seneca Falls convention that launched the movement for woman's rights in the United States--six women in rural upstate New York sat down to write a petition to their state's constitutional convention, demanding "equal, and civil and political rights with men." Refusing to invoke the traditional language of deference, motherhood, or Christianity as they made their claim, the women even declined to defend their position, asserting that "a self evident truth is sufficiently plain without argument." Who were these women, Lori Ginzberg asks, and how might their story change the collective memory of the struggle for woman's rights? Very few clues remain about the petitioners, but Ginzberg pieces together information from census records, deeds, wills, and newspapers to explore why, at a time when the notion of women as full citizens was declared unthinkable and considered too dangerous to discuss, six ordinary women embraced it as common sense. By weaving their radical local action into the broader narrative of antebellum intellectual life and political identity, Ginzberg brings new light to the story of woman's rights and of some women's sense of themselves as full members of the nation.