Birthplace of Women’s Movement

This small Central New York town on the north shore of Cayuga Lake is the cradle of the women’s rights movement.

That’s why the Women’s Rights National Historic Park and the National Women’s Hall of Fame are here.

“Few are aware that the first women’s rights convention in the world took place in Seneca Falls. It was held July 19 and 20, 1848,” said Judy Hart, 47, the National Park Service’s liaison with Congress.

It was Hart who suggested a National Historic Park be established here to preserve and protect the sites associated with the 1848 convention and to spread the word about the ensuing struggle for women’s rights and equality.

She did the principal work in promoting the idea through Congress, and she was the park’s first superintendent, getting it off the ground in March, 1981.

“It has been tremendously exciting. Within two years all the components of the historic park should be in place,” said Hart, a 23-year veteran with the Park Service.

The women’s rights movement began inconspicuously with five women at a tea party on July 9, 1848.

Four of the women were Quakers active in temperance and abolition work: Lucretia Mott, her sister Martha Wright, Mary Ann McClintock and Jane Hunt. The fifth woman was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the mother of seven children, who later became known as the founder and philosopher of the women’s rights movement.

Stanton’s husband, Henry, was an abolitionist leader. It was at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 that Mott and Elizabeth Stanton first met. There the two women discussed women’s rights and equality and vowed to meet again to formulate a plan to do something about the issues.

But it wasn’t until eight years later that they saw each other again, this time at the tea party where they and the other three women began expressing anger and discontent about the role of women’s lot in life. They decided to have a women’s rights convention and agreed to meet a week later to plan the event at McClintock’s house.

At the McClintock home, the five women sat around a mahogany table and drafted a document called the Declaration of Sentiments, which served as a framework for their convention.

Stanton, principal architect of the Declaration of Sentiments, was 33 at the time, the same age as Thomas Jefferson when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. It was her idea to model the Declaration of Sentiments after the Declaration of Independence.

“We hold the truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal,” read the Declaration of Sentiments with the words and women added.

“Because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States,” the declaration continued.

The Seneca County Courier carried an announcement that a women’s rights convention would be held at the Weslayan Methodist Church on July 19 and 20, only nine days after the five women first sat down around a table drinking tea and airing their grievances.

More than 300 men and women showed up at the church. Stanton, a housewife who had never given a speech in her life, courageously stood up and read the Declaration of Sentiments. Genteel women at that time did not speak in public.

“Mrs. Stanton had been filled with increasing terror,” wrote Miriam Gurko in “The Ladies of Seneca Falls,” her book about the birth of the women’s rights movement. “It was a combination of stage fright at the prospect of making her first public speech, and consternation at having initiated this unprecedented action by women.

“A housewife in any period might have quailed at such a formidable undertaking; for a woman in 1848 it was outrageously rash and untraditional, which made it practically earth-shaking.”

At the convention, they passed resolutions proposing women’s right to vote, their right to equal pay, their right to control their own money and their right to receive equal treatment under the law. The declaration and resolutions were signed by 68 women and 32 men. The suffrage movement was under way.

When the park service’s Hart came to Seneca Falls, population 7,000, to launch the Women’s Rights National Historic Park, her first office was in a vacant room at the local radio station.

“Funding that first year was $5,000. The park consisted of me, my second-hand typewriter and a couple of temporary exhibits,” she recalled.

In 1982, the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Foundation donated Mrs. Stanton’s home, but still the park was small and incomplete.

Now the National Park Service is opening a permanent visitors’ center, building a new exhibit arena called Declaration Park, and buying the McClintock home where the declaration was written.

The centerpiece of the Declaration Park is Weslayan Methodist Church, which was purchased three years ago. The church, built in the 1830s, has gone through many changes over the years. Its last use was a self-service laundry and an apartment house.

“We will keep only those parts of the church that were there when the convention was held, that is the roof and two walls. Everything else will be removed,” said Linda Canzanelli, 33, Hart’s successor as superintendent of the historic park.

A contest with a $15,000 prize was held to design Declaration Park. Ann Marshall and Ray Kinoshita, students at the Harvard School of Design, submitted the winning entry.

The two walls and roof of the old church will become an open-air building with exhibit panels. A huge reproduction of the Declaration of Sentiments will stand next to a “water wall.”

To complete the renovations on Women’s Rights National Historic Park, the park service is going to convert the turn-of-the-century village hall into a permanent visitors center. A temporary visitors center filled with exhibits pertaining to the history of the women’s rights struggle is half a block away.

The Stanton home is also open for visitation, and the McClintock home soon will be. It is hoped the historic park will be finished with all the components open to the public within two years.

A block from the Women’s Rights National Historic Park is the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

Twenty years ago, nearly two dozen Seneca Falls women met over tea, just like the five original feminists, to formulate plans for the Hall of Fame. In 1973 they inducted the first group of 20 women who made outstanding contributions to this nation’s history.

Last year a national committee chose Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space, and Gwendolyn Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning black poet. A total of 42 women have been honored, including Marian Anderson, Susan B. Anthony, Mary Cassatt, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Amelia Earhart, Helen Hayes, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, Helen Keller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, and “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias.

An illustrated biography of each inductee is featured on a large panel in the Hall of Fame.

“Until now only a few thousand a year have visited the Women’s Rights National Historic Park and the National Women’s Hall of Fame, but we expect the numbers to jump to at least 200,000 annually once the historic park is completed,” said Hart.

It is anticipated that considerable media attention will then be focused on the Hall of Fame and historic park, and many more Americans will learn about the feminists of Seneca Falls, their Declaration of Sentiments and the history of the women’s rights movement the past 141 years.