The Seneca Falls Convention, an historic gathering that produced one of the most important documents in the long fight for women’s rights, is the focus of today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp celebrating “100 Years of Progress of Women” issued on July 19, 1948, the 100th anniversary of that 2-day gathering in western New York State. The stamp pictures Elisabeth Cady Stanton, who helped organize the event; Lucretia Mott, a leading advocate of women’s rights who spoke at it; and Carrie Chapman Catt, who was born after the event and played a central role in long fight to secure adoption of the 1920 constitutional amendment “giving” women the right to vote.

Advertised as “a convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman” the event drew about 300 attendees who were presented with a “Declaration of Sentiments,” primarily drafted by Stanton who drew heavily on the Declaration of Independence. That document, which historian Judith Wellman has contended it was “the single most important factor in spreading news of the women’s rights movement around the country in 1848 and into the future” is worth quoting at some length.

“…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…[So,] when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is [people’s] duty to throw off such government…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 usurpation 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….

• He has not ever permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
• He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
• He has withheld her from rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men-both natives and foreigners.
• Having deprived her of this first right as a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.\He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
• He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.
• 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.
• He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes of divorce, in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given; as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of the women-the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of a man, and giving all power into his hands….
• 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.
• He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education-all colleges being closed against her….
• 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 deemed of little account in man.
• 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 her God.
• 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 these 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 effect our object….”
The call for the right to vote sparked intense debate. Many – including Mott – opposed it. But Frederick Douglass, who was the convention’s sole African American attendee, argued eloquently for its inclusion. In the end, it was retained but only one-third of the attendees (including Mott) signed the document.

The call for the right to vote soon became central to the fight for women’s rights. The work, of course, took decades. In fact, only one of the original signatories—Charlotte Woodward – was alive in 1920 when the 19th Amendment was ratified (and she was not well enough to exercise the right in the presidential election later that year). And, of course, the work was incomplete. Although the 1947 stamp celebrated “100 Years of Progress for Women,” black women didn’t get the right to vote until the 1965 Voting Rights Act; many of the other legal constraints raised in the declaration remained in force until the latter part of the 20th century; and many of the structural and cultural obstacles cited in the declaration are still with us today.

Nevertheless, the stamp is still a powerful reminder that, in the words of the declaration, we should “insist” that all people (citizens and non-citizens alike) who are “aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights…have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them” not only because they are US citizens but also because they are human.

Stay well, be safe, fight for (and insist on) justice, and work for peace