The First Women's Rights Convention Began With a Locked Door

On July 19, 1848, the organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention arrived to find their chapel bolted shut and a crowd waiting outside. Inside, they would copy the Declaration of Independence and add two words. Of the sixty-eight women who signed it, one lived to see the vote, and she never cast a ballot.

The morning of July 19 was hot and sunny when the five organizers reached the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, shortly before ten. The doors were locked, an overlooked detail, and a crowd was already gathered outside. Stanton's young nephew Daniel was lifted through an open window to unbolt the doors from within. The first women's rights convention in the United States could not get into its own building.

The meeting existed because women had been silenced at someone else's. Eight years earlier, in June 1840, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had crossed the Atlantic for the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London. After a full day of debate, the male delegates voted to bar the women from speaking or voting; they could sit behind a curtain in the gallery and listen. "As Mrs. Mott and I walked home arm in arm, commenting on the incidents of the day," Stanton later wrote, "we resolved to hold a convention as soon as we returned home, and to form a society to advocate the rights of women." It took eight years.

On July 9, 1848, Mott, Stanton, Martha Coffin Wright, Jane Hunt, and Mary Ann M'Clintock had met over tea at the Hunt home in nearby Waterloo and decided to hold a convention in ten days. In the M'Clintock parlor, on a three-legged mahogany tea table, they drafted a Declaration of Sentiments modeled on the Declaration of Independence. Stanton made two edits to the founding document of the nation. She inserted "and women" after "all men," so the line read "all men and women are created equal." And she replaced "the present King of Great Britain" with "mankind" as the source of "repeated injuries and usurpations... having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her."

About three hundred people came over two days. The first day had been advertised for women only, but roughly forty men showed up anyway and were admitted on the condition they stay silent. The Declaration was read aloud by Stanton, debated paragraph by paragraph, and put out for signatures. One hundred people signed, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men, the men listed separately as "in favor of the movement."

The most contentious item was the ninth resolution, demanding "the elective franchise." Even Lucretia Mott urged dropping it as too radical. Frederick Douglass, the only African American present, seconded Stanton's motion. The power to choose the rulers and make the laws, he argued, was "the right by which all others could be secured." The resolution passed by a slim majority. Nine days later, in his Rochester newspaper The North Star, Douglass published "The Rights of Women": "Our doctrine is, that 'Right is of no sex.' " His printer, John Dick, set the type for the official pamphlet of the proceedings at the North Star Office.

Seventy-two years passed between Seneca Falls and the Nineteenth Amendment. Of the sixty-eight women who signed the Declaration of Sentiments, only one, Charlotte Woodward Pierce, lived to see women win the vote. She was ninety-one, bedridden and going blind. On Election Day 1920 she was too ill to go to the polls. "I'm too old," she said. "I'm afraid I'll never vote." As far as anyone knows, she never did.

Also on this day

1553: Mary I was proclaimed queen, ending the nine-day reign of her fifteen-year-old cousin Lady Jane Grey, who would be beheaded the following February.
1903: Maurice Garin, a chimney sweep turned cyclist, won the first Tour de France, finishing nearly three hours ahead of second place, a margin of victory that has never been matched in the race's history.
1941: At midnight the BBC launched the "V for Victory" campaign, with the mystery broadcaster "Colonel Britton" urging occupied Europe to chalk the letter on walls and tap it out in Morse code, three dots and a dash, the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth.
1943: An American fleet of Flying Fortresses and Liberators bombed Rome's railway yards for the first time, killing some 1,500 people in the San Lorenzo district and shattering the belief that had drawn civilians into the supposedly safe holy city. Six days later Mussolini was arrested.