La Convención de Seneca Falls
En julio de 1848, se celebró la Convención de Seneca Falls en Seneca Falls, Nueva York. En esta primera convención de los derechos de las mujeres, alrededor de 300 asistentes se reunieron para discutir los derechos sociales, civiles y religiosos de las mujeres y para escribir una Declaración de Sentimientos para explicar su posición y exigir más derechos para las mujeres.
Las cinco mujeres que organizaron la convención y se convirtieron en líderes del movimiento por los derechos de las mujeres fueron Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Mary M’Clintock, Martha Coffin Wright y Jane Hunt.
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Seneca Falls, New York, 1848
NARRATOR: Some three hundred people had come that July to discuss the rights of women, and had listened as 32-year-old abolitionist Elizabeth Cady Stanton decried the lack of them––provocatively comparing her condition, as a free married woman with children, to slavery.
"We assemble to protest against a form of government existing without the consent of the governed," Stanton proclaimed, "to declare our right to be free as man is free."
ELLEN DUBOIS, HIstorian: At the time of Seneca Falls, a woman had no legal existence. When married, she was "absorbed into the person of her husband." Now that would be fine if there were women who weren’t married, but adult women were overwhelmingly married women, and they had no legal standing.
MARY WALTON, Writer: Married women could not sign a contract. If they worked outside the home, they couldn’t keep their paycheck. It went to their husbands. If they dared to divorce, husbands retained custody of the children. The doors of public universities were closed to them. There were just many, many ways in which they were second-class citizens.
NARRATOR: The Declaration of Sentiments adopted by the convention had been modeled on the Declaration of Independence, and included a list of resolutions outlining the rights to which women, as citizens, should be entitled.
ELAINE WEISS, Writer: Seneca Falls is the first very public demonstration and announcement that women are asking for a whole series of rights that they feel they’ve been denied. And it is considered really radical.
ELEANOR SMEAL, Women's Rights Leader: They’re fighting for education. They’re fighting for the right to own property. They wanted to be full adult American citizens.
NARRATOR: Of the eleven resolutions put forward by Stanton, only one was considered so controversial that it failed to pass unanimously: Resolution Nine, which demanded for women the right to vote––a right that had engendered equal controversy among the men who wrote the U.S. Constitution.
ALEXANDER KEYSSAR, HIstorian: One of the remarkable things about the history of democracy in the United States is that the Constitution, in its original form, said nothing about the right to vote. When the Founding Fathers talked about “We, the people,” they were talking about adult, white males, and really, adult, white, respectable males. They had different views about how broad the franchise should be. So instead of hammering out a consensus view, they punted and left voting rights to the states.
In most states, the notion was that in order to have the franchise, you had to be independent in some economic and social sense. And women had few opportunities to be independent.
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