Summary Overview

The Declaration of Sentiments was written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and was presented to the participants at a convention in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19–20, 1848. Modeling her work on the Declaration of Independence, the author sought to address the wrongs perpetrated against womankind and called for redress of those wrongs. The Seneca Falls meeting was the first convention specifically devoted to the issue of women’s rights. Organized by Stanton, Lucretia Coffin Mott, Mary Ann McClintock, Martha Wright, and Jane Hunt, the convention’s goal was to address “the social, civil and religious rights of women,” according to the Seneca County Courier of July 14, 1848. The Declaration of Sentiments summed up the current state of women’s rights in the United States and served notice that women would no longer stand for being treated inequitably.

While antebellum reformers, many of whom were abolitionists, connected the situation of women with that of slaves, in that neither could vote, hold office, sit on juries, or have property rights, the Seneca Falls Convention marked the first time that men and women publicly discussed the issue of women’s rights. The people who gathered at Seneca Falls realized that they were taking an unprecedented—not to mention controversial—step in calling for full citizenship for American women. The Declaration of Sentiments was considered radical for its time, especially in the clause calling for suffrage of women. In the context of antebellum America, this document is indeed a radical one. While it took seventy-two years for women to get the vote and even longer to abolish other forms of discrimination, the Declaration of Sentiments marked the first step in the long struggle for women’s rights.

Defining Moment

The United States in the 1840s seethed with a variety of reform movements, inspired by the religious upheaval known as the Second Great Awakening as well as the rise of transcendentalism. Reformers thought they could improve American society by changing some of the ills they perceived as plagues upon the nation. Some of the reformers’ causes included better treatment of the mentally ill, opposition to capital punishment and war, temperance, and most notably, abolitionism.

Men of conscience, however, were not the only ones who wanted to free the enslaved. Female abolitionists played a number of roles in the fight to end slavery, circulating petitions to Congress, holding antislavery fairs, contributing articles to antislavery publications, and organizing antislavery societies. Some even took the daring step of speaking out publicly against slavery.

The seed for what became the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 was actually planted several years earlier at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met for the first time at the London convention. Stanton was accompanying her husband, Henry, who was a delegate to the convention. Mott was actually a delegate herself but, because of her gender, was denied a seat at the convention. This blatant discrimination forced the women to rethink their treatment in American society and call for their rights as free citizens of the United States.

The immediate impetus for the Seneca Falls Convention was the impending passage of a married women’s property law in New York State, which would give married women some property rights. The convention’s organizers hoped that by meeting they would bring awareness to the inequitable treatment of women and gain support for passage of the law. Mott’s husband, James, chaired the convention; the participants feared that having a woman preside would only increase hostility toward their cause. The Declaration of Sentiments was one of two documents produced at the convention. The other was a preamble followed by a series of eleven resolutions making various demands for women’s rights, including the right to vote. All eleven resolutions passed, ten of them unanimously. Only the demand for the vote was not passed unanimously. Indeed, even Lucretia Mott felt that asking for votes for women would harm their cause.

Author Biography

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born on November 12, 1815, in Johnstown, New York, the daughter of Margaret Livingstone and Daniel Cady. Young Elizabeth received tutoring in Greek and mathematics; she also became an accomplished equestrian. By reading her father’s law books, she learned that women were accorded a second-class status in the legal realm, planting the seed that eventually matured into her campaign for women’s rights.

She became involved in the abolition movement, where she met Henry Stanton, whom she married in 1840. Stanton accompanied her husband to London in that year, where he was a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention. She met another American delegate, Lucretia Coffin Mott, who, because of her gender, could not take her seat at the convention. All the female delegates were allowed only to observe the proceedings in silence. This fateful meeting eventually culminated in the Seneca Falls Convention.

In 1847 the Stantons left Boston for Seneca Falls, in Upstate New York, because of Henry’s health. As she became involved in her new home, Stanton made the acquaintance of women who agreed that something needed to be done to improve the rights of women. Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Jane Hunt, Martha Wright, and Mary Ann McClintock organized a convention to discuss the rights of women. The Seneca Falls Convention, where Stanton presented her Declaration of Sentiments, gave birth to other women’s rights conventions around the country, including the first national convention, in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850. The conventions continued until the outbreak of the Civil War.

Until her death on October 26, 1902, Stanton worked tirelessly for women’s rights. Her ideas were often considered too radical for the mainstream, and eventually it was Susan B. Anthony who received most of the adulation from young suffragists, whose primary goal was the vote. In a great disservice to Stanton, the Nineteenth Amendment is also referred to as the “Susan B. Anthony amendment.” With the revitalization of the feminist movement in the 1960s, Stanton has been restored to her proper place of importance as a founding mother of modern feminism.

Document Analysis

The opening of the Declaration of Sentiments justifies the actions of those who support women’s rights and prepares the reader for the litany of the wrongs perpetrated against womankind. Stanton uses the religious language of the Declaration of Independence when she refers to “nature’s God” and points out that the rights women are demanding come not from government but from “nature” as well as the Supreme Being.

Stanton goes on to state, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” This ringing proclamation comes directly from the Declaration of Independence, with only the words “and women” added. Women, like men, are entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and the government was instituted to make sure that all people are guaranteed these rights. Stanton states that people who have been denied their rights have the right to “refuse allegiance” to their government and “insist upon the institution of a new government.” In fact, those who are abused in this way have a responsibility and duty “to throw off such government.” These are the words Thomas Jefferson used to justify the American people’s break from Great Britain and formation of a new government. Stanton added, however, language stating that women have suffered patiently under the current government, which has denied them their full rights, and “such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled.”

A statement that the “history of mankind is a history of repeated injustices and usurpations on the part of man toward woman” introduces the lengthy portion of the document that lists the wrongs visited upon womankind. The first five focus on women’s lack of political rights, beginning with the fact that women are denied the vote. Logically, from lacking the vote, women are subject to laws that they had no say in making. The next item argues that women have been denied simple rights possessed by even the “most ignorant and degraded” men, not only native-born but even foreign. This statement was an appeal to the nativist element that was emerging in the late nineteenth century. The next statement again makes mention of the denial of “the elective franchise” in the context of denying women “representation in the halls of the legislation.”

The next set of wrongs deals with marriage and property rights. Stanton observes that the institution of marriage has been particularly destructive to women, given that married women are defined outright as “civilly dead” in the eyes of the law. Because of that, married women have no rights to property, even their own wages. The next clause states that because of the usurpation of these rights, the law has essentially rendered woman “an irresponsible being” who can commit any crime without fear of punishment, as long as it is done “in the presence of her husband.” Stanton further notes that women must obey their husbands unquestioningly and that the law gives him the power “to deprive her of her liberty” and physically and emotionally abuse her without recourse. Divorce is the next topic, and here women are denied the guardianship of their children, no matter what the cause for ending the marriage. Single women are mentioned in the next clause, which points out that if a single woman is a property owner, then she is subject to taxes; thus the government “recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.”

Clauses on employment, education, and religion make up the next set. Stanton states that men have “monopolized nearly all the profitable employments.” Not only that, but in the professions women could enter, they were not equitably paid. The next clause focuses on education, noting that all colleges are “closed against her.” Stanton actually slightly exaggerates in this clause, as Oberlin College did admit women equally with men by 1848, but that was the exception rather than the rule. Organized religion comes under attack next, for it keeps women “in a subordinate position,” barring them from the ministry and generally from any “public participation in the affairs of the church.” Not only are women discriminated against by “the church,” but also in the realm of morals they are subjected to a double standard; as the clause puts it, there is “a different code of morals for men and women.” The penultimate clause makes reference to God and states that man has “usurped” the Lord’s “prerogative” by assigning woman a sphere of action “when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.” Finally, the last clause states that man has decreed women should be submissive and dependent, destroying “her confidence in her own powers” and lessening “her self-respect.”

The last paragraph sums up the entire document. Stanton states that in light of the aforementioned grievances, including “the disenfranchisement of one-half the people of this country,” American women “insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.”

Essential Themes

The Declaration of Sentiments was revolutionary and echoed the ideology behind America’s own Revolution. By changing the language of the Declaration of Independence, the basic document proclaiming America’s independence from tyranny, Stanton brought focus to the failure of that document to provide rights for half of America’s citizens: women.

The Declaration of Sentiments was written for several audiences. The first audience was the men and women who participated in the Seneca Falls Convention. Following the form and adapting many of the key concepts of the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Sentiments sought to set forth the wrongs done to women and offer a redress of those wrongs. Thus, another audience was the men who served as the lawmakers of the United States, both in the federal government and in each state and territory. These people made the laws and needed to be aware that women were treated as second-class citizens and were not granted all the rights of other American citizens. The last audience was the people of the United States. The document was intended to raise the awareness of all Americans regarding the treatment of women in the nation that proclaimed that “all men are created equal.”

Bibliography and Additional Reading