Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
The great evening of the week was the one devoted to the Commemorative
Program in Honor of the 1848 Convention. This convention was called by
Mrs. Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Mary Ann McClintock and Martha C.
Wright--the last three Friends, or Quakers--to consider a Declaration
of Sentiments and set of Resolutions which they had prepared and it
adopted both.[58] Those resolutions of sixty years ago were now
discussed by women who represented the two succeeding generations,
still in the midst of the contest which the women who began it
expected to see ended during their lifetime. The session was opened
with prayer by the Rev. Olympia Brown, a veteran suffragist, and the
presiding officer was Mrs. Eliza Wright Osborne (N. Y.), daughter of
Martha C. Wright and niece of Lucretia Mott. Each resolution was
presented and commented on in a brief, pungent speech, the speakers
including Mr. Blackwell, husband of Lucy Stone, both pioneers, and
another pioneer, the Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first
ordained woman minister; Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of Mrs.
Stanton; Mrs. Fanny Garrison Villard, daughter of William Lloyd
Garrison, a pioneer; the Rev. Anna Garlin Spencer, an early leader in
Rhode Island, and Miss Laura Clay, at the head of the movement in
Kentucky almost from its beginning. Among the later generation were
the Rev. Caroline Bartlett Crane (Mich.), Miss Julie R. Jenney (N.
Y.), Mrs. Ella S. Stewart (Ill.), Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (N.
Y.) and Mrs. Judith Hyams Douglas (La.).
Of most of these addresses there is no printed record. Mrs. Gilman
commented on the resolution that "the laws which place woman in a
position inferior to that of man are contrary to the great precept of
nature," saying in part: "Woman has the same right to happiness and
justice as an individual that man has and as the mother of the race
she has more.... Women have a right to citizenship and to all that
citizenship implies, not only for their own sake but especially
because the world needs them. We have the masculine and the feminine
but above them both is the human, which has nothing to do with sex.
The argument for equal freedom and equal opportunities for women rests
not on the law of the worthy Mr. Blackstone but on the law of nature,
which is the law of God...."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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