CULTURE VULTURE

Seneca Falls history one apparently never learns at school

Part I

BY C.S. GILBERT

At last month’s Key West National Organization of Women (NOW) meeting, longtime member Betty Desbiens was presenting a list of feminist foremothers (they called themselves suffragists, because the British term of suffragette sounded too cutesy and undignified) to profile during the feminist group’s annual celebration of the ratification on Aug. 26, 1920, of the Woman Suffrage Amendment, giving women the right to vote.

A 20-something member complained that women’s history was never taught in the Florida public schools. “Maybe there was a paragraph somewhere, but it wasn’t really taught,” she reported.

This month, then, Culture Vulture will introduce a few foremothers of modern day women’s rights, including the right to vote and, later, the rights supporting reproductive self-determination.

July 19-20, 1848, is the first major date in the history of women’s rights in the U.S. This is the date of Lucretia Mott’s and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Seneca Falls Convention. (Stanton and later recruit Susan B. Anthony were early wonder women, collaborating to raise Stanton’s seven children while simultaneously nurturing the first wave of feminism in the United States.) Also at the convention, incidentally, was Frederick Douglass.

For an event little noticed by the Florida Department of Education, Seneca Falls has been the topic of extensive coverage and commentary by everyone from the History Channel to the Library of Congress, the National Park Service, Wikipedia, the Smithsonian and umpteen universities. I’ve chosen the account on Historynet.com. Details sometimes vary from source to source; for example, it is agreed that glove maker Charlotte Woodward, who was 19 when she attended the convention, was the only attendee still alive on Nov. 2, 1920, the first election in which all women in the country were allowed to vote; it is reported variously, however, that she cast her vote or was too ill to get to the polls.

Back to the beginning. Stanton and Mott “met at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840. The other delegates had voted to exclude women before the convention started and required them to sit in a sectioned-off area. At the time, Mott was in her mid-40s and a Quaker minister, feminist and abolitionist. Stanton, a young bride and active abolitionist, admired Mott and the two became friends. At one point during the convention, they discussed the possibility of a women’s rights convention.

“Eight years later, Stanton was living in Seneca Falls, N.Y., when Lucretia Mott was visiting her sister, Martha C. Wright, in nearby Waterloo, N.Y. During a social visit on July 14, Stanton, Mott, Wright, and Mary Ann McClintock and Jane Hunt decided that it was time ‘to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women’ publicly — in just five days time. They publicized the convention mainly by word of mouth, although they did place a small notice in the local paper. They knew it would be a comparatively small convention, but as Mott told Stanton, ‘It will be a start.'”

It was more than a start; it was, in truth, the foundation on which every women’s right between then and now has been built.

TO BE CONTINUED

That’s it for now. Gotta fly!

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