The Seneca Falls Convention launches the organised women's rights movement

Date

19–20 July 1848

Category

Social & demographic

Region

United States (New York)

Era

Modern

Significance

On 19 and 20 July 1848 some three hundred people gathered at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, for the first women's rights convention in the United States.

Organised by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and others, many of them veterans of the antislavery movement, the convention adopted a Declaration of Sentiments modelled on the Declaration of Independence. It proclaimed that 'all men and women are created equal' and catalogued women's exclusion from the vote, from property and legal rights, from education and from the professions. Sixty-eight women and thirty-two men, including the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, signed the document; its most contested clause, demanding the right to vote, passed only after Douglass spoke in its favour. Seneca Falls did not by itself secure any legal change, but it crystallised scattered grievances into a coherent programme and is widely regarded as the birthplace of the organised American women's suffrage and rights movement. Its example and its links to abolitionism resonated internationally, helping to inspire campaigns for women's legal and political equality that would unfold across the following century.

Empires active in 19–20 July 1848

• Russian Empire
  1721 CE – 1917 CE
• French Colonial Empire (Second)
  1830 CE – 1962 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Qing Dynasty
  1636 CE – 1912 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE

Related social & demographic events

• The Great Irish Famine
  1845–1852
• Emancipation of the serfs in Russia
  3 March 1861 (19 February O.S.)
• Influenza pandemic of 1918–1920
  1918–1920
• The Holocaust and the 'Final Solution'
  1941–1945
• Bengal Famine of 1943
  1943–1944
• Indian indenture system begins in Mauritius
  2 November 1834

Further reading

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

The wider story

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

Global best-seller on how our species, its populations and societies remade the world.

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