Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
This call, without signature, was issued by Lucretia Mott, Martha C.
Wright, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Mary Ann McClintock. At this time
Mrs. Mott was visiting her sister Mrs. Wright, at Auburn, and
attending the Yearly Meeting of Friends in Western New York. Mrs.
Stanton, having recently removed from Boston to Seneca Falls, finding
the most congenial associations in Quaker families, met Mrs. Mott
incidentally for the first time since her residence there. They at
once returned to the topic they had so often discussed, walking arm
in arm in the streets of London, and Boston, "the propriety of holding
a woman's convention." These four ladies, sitting round the tea-table
of Richard Hunt, a prominent Friend near Waterloo, decided to put
their long-talked-of resolution into action, and before the twilight
deepened into night, the call was written, and sent to the Seneca
County Courier. On Sunday morning they met in Mrs. McClintock's parlor
to write their declaration, resolutions, and to consider subjects for
speeches.[8] As the convention was to assemble in three days, the time
was short for such productions; but having no experience in the _modus
operandi_ of getting up conventions, nor in that kind of literature,
they were quite innocent of the herculean labors they proposed. On the
first attempt to frame a resolution; to crowd a complete thought,
clearly and concisely, into three lines; they felt as helpless and
hopeless as if they had been suddenly asked to construct a steam
engine. And the humiliating fact may as well now be recorded that
before taking the initiative step, those ladies resigned themselves to
a faithful perusal of various masculine productions. The reports of
Peace, Temperance, and Anti-Slavery conventions were examined, but all
alike seemed too tame and pacific for the inauguration of a rebellion
such as the world had never before seen. They knew women had wrongs,
but how to state them was the difficulty, and this was increased from
the fact that they themselves were fortunately organized and
conditioned; they were neither "sour old maids," "childless women,"
nor "divorced wives," as the newspapers declared them to be. While
they had felt the insults incident to sex, in many ways, as every
proud, thinking woman must, in the laws, religion, and literature of
the world, and in the invidious and degrading sentiments and customs
of all nations, yet they had not in their own experience endured the
coarser forms of tyranny resulting from unjust laws, or association
with immoral and unscrupulous men, but they had souls large enough to
feel the wrongs of others, without being scarified in their own flesh.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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