Women\'s History

3 Pages 646 Words

THE SENECA FALLS CONVENTION
In July 1848, on the initiative of Mott and Stanton, the first women’s rights convention met at a Wesleyan church chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. Between 100 and 300 people attended the convention, among them many male sympathizers. After serious discussion of proposed means to achieve their ends, the delegates finally agreed that the primary goal should be attainment of the franchise. The convention then adopted a Declaration of Sentiments patterned after the American Declaration of Independence.

Public reaction to the Seneca Falls convention presaged a stormy future for the new movement. Although many prominent Americans, including the famed editor Horace Greeley and the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, warmly supported it, many citizens and the great majority of newspapers responded with ridicule, fury, and vilification. Suffragists were called the shrieking sisterhood, branded as unfeminine, and accused of immorality and drunkenness. Later, when suffragist leaders undertook speaking tours in support of women’s rights, temperance, and abolition, they were often subjected to physical violence. Meetings repeatedly were stormed and disrupted by gangs of street bullies. On one occasion when Anthony spoke in Albany, New York, the city mayor sat on the rostrum brandishing a revolver to discourage possible attacks by hoodlums in the audience. Despite intimidation, the woman-suffrage and abolitionist movements continued for some years to grow side by side.
V AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
Bitter disagreements over strategy engendered a schism between the suffragist and abolitionist groups after the American Civil War. Many male abolitionists voiced fears that the demands of women suffragists might impede the campaign to gain voting rights for male ex-slaves. The issue came to a head in 1868, when the abolitionists pressed for a constitutional amendment enfranchising all Americans regardless of rac...