THE DECLARATION OF Rights and SENTIMENTS
Background:
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, two American activists in the movement to abolish slavery, called together the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women’s rights convention in the United States. It is held in Seneca Falls, NY in 1848, part of the reason for doing so had been that Mott had been refused permission to speak at the world anti-slavery convention in London, even though she had been an official delegate. Applying the analysis of human freedom developed in the Abolitionist Movement, Stanton and others began to the public career of modern feminist analysis. “A convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton is the principal author of the Declaration of Sentiments, although influenced strongly by Sarah Grimke’s writings that advocated that God had created woman equal to man and that man had usurped God’s authority by establishing “absolute tyranny” over woman. 68 women and 32 men—including Frederick Douglass, a leader of the abolitionist movement, signed the document and is an example of how many of the reform movements of the age were inter-dependent. As we see many woman involved in this conference also being very active as abolitionists, so much so that many put the women’s rights movement behind their efforts to end slavery in America until after the Civil War.
The Document:
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 which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.
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; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind is more disposed to suffer. While evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity, which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled. 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.
1-He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
2-He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
3-He has withheld from her rights, which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men--both natives and foreigners.
4-Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.
5-He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
6-He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.
7-He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master--the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.
8-He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes, and in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women--the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.
9-After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government, which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.
10-He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction, which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
11-He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her.
12-He allows her in church, as well as state, but a subordinate position, claiming apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the church.
13-He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies, which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but also deemed of little account in man.
14-He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.
15-He has 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.
Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation--in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.
In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to affect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and National Legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this convention will be followed by a series of conventions, embracing every part of the country.
Questions:
1 Who, When, Where?
2 What do you notice (2 quotes from the document, please)? Please explain Why you chose each?
3 What document is this similar to in style and language?
4 Context? Intended Audience? Purpose? Point of View?
From The Gilder Leherman AP Review site:
Mobilizing people against slavery triggered a movement to secure greater political participation for women. Sarah and Angelina Grimke, who championed both abolition and women’s rights, were forceful advocates from the South. With Garrison, they proved to be the fulcrum for the entwined efforts. Propertied women had voted in New Jersey for thirty-three years after the Revolution, but they lost that right as citizenship became less defined by property and more by independence, which the law denied women. At the same time American popular culture defined woman’s role as the presiding domestic presence and nurturer of male citizens.[17]When the American Anti-Slavery Society encouraged women to take an active part in its outreach, some men broke away to form an anti-slavery society that did not admit women. This kind of response intensified the determination of a handful of pioneers—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Lucretia Mott—to pursue the struggle for equal rights for women. It would be hard to exaggerate how radical this movement was in the 1840s and 1850s, yet the work these women had done in anti-slavery work and the temperance movement made it seem quite natural to them that women should be active in the public sphere.
Stanton came from a prominent New York family. She not only received an excellent academy education, she also learned about the law from her father’s law clerks. Strong willed and talented, she studied and then rejected the legal system that so thoroughly subordinated women, especially wives, to men.[18]She and her abolitionist husband honeymooned in London, where they attended the Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. Mott, a charismatic Quaker feminist, also attended. When the men voted to deny women participation in the conference, Stanton and Mott forged a bond. Mott, like two other women’s rights leaders, Lucy Stone and Susan Anthony, had awakened to the discrimination against women when she discovered that male colleagues where she was teaching earned four times more than she did.
Stone was the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree; she was also unique in refusing to take her husband’s name. Stanton said that Stone “was the first person by whom the heat of the American public was deeply stirred on the woman question.”[19]
Through temperance and abolitionist work, many women learned the organizational skills that were to stand them in good stead when they turned their heads and hearts toward eradicating the laws and mores subjugating women because of their sex. In 1848, Stanton and Mott threw themselves into organizing the Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Drawing 300 activists, among them forty men, the convention endorsed Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments, which was based on the Declaration of Independence. Delegates at the convention passed a number of resolutions, including an audacious claim for the right to vote. Leading newspapers, in an attempt to ridicule the proceedings, published in full the Declaration of Sentiments with its description of an aristocracy of sex “exalting brute force above moral power, vice above virtue, ignorance above education, and the son above the mother who bore him.” The publicity was an attempt to scandalize the public, but Stanton shrewdly observed the widening of their of readership as a result.
Learning about the Seneca Falls convention drew Susan Anthony to active participation in the women’s rights movement. Her Quaker father was both a cotton manufacturer and an abolitionist who undertook her education after he discovered that her primary school limited the subjects it would teach girls. In 1851, Anthony met Stanton, and the two of them founded the first women’s temperance society. After that they traveled together on speaking tours, which became forays into hostile territory punctuated by insults and battery. Stone, who was also an indefatigable speaker, reported occasions when she was hit by ice, rotten fruit, eggs, and a hymnal.[20]
Many women were turned into agitators for women’s rights because of negative reactions to their participation in the reform movements that were sweeping the North in the antebellum period. They felt compelled to seek the liberty, equality, and independence that Americans extolled as a national legacy and overcame any personal timidity to do so. After the Civil War, they continued to campaign for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery. But the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 giving newly freed African American men the voting privileges that the women had so long sought became a bitter pill to swallow.[21]
National Women’s Suffrage Association – NWSA (known as NaWSA)