Women’s History Series Part 1

The Party that Started it All: Seneca Falls

So, the best party that none of us were ever invited to occurred 165 years ago in Seneca Falls, NY. It became known as The Seneca Falls Convention and it was planned by women from the area in conjunction with Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. These women were primarily members of a radical Quaker group though Stanton was not. The meeting spanned two days, July 19th and 20th in 1848 (Yup. I just said 1848 and I’d like to point out that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) have still not been ratified.) Evidently, change takes a long time when you are busy having babies, raising babies and trying to run the world in general.

The Seneca Convention consisted of six sessions including legal lectures, comedic presentations (laugh so you won’t cry) and discussions regarding the role of women in society. The net result was the creation of two documents, the Declaration of Sentiments and a list of resolutions which the moderators wanted to discuss, debate and amend before garnering signatures. Exactly 100 of approximately 300 attendees signed the document, 68 women and 32 men. Can you imagine that 200 or so people were there, heard the debates and didn’t sign? Fear can be quite debilitating in politics.

Let’s take a look at one of the resolutions to gain some perspective. 

Resolved, therefore, that, being invested by the Creator with the same capabilities, and the same consciousness of responsibility for their exercise, it is demonstrably the right and duty of woman, equally with man, to promote every righteous cause, by every righteous means; and especially in regard to the great subjects of morals and religion, it is self-evidently her right to participate with her brother in teaching them, both in private and in public, by writing and by speaking, by any instrumentalities proper to be used, and in any assemblies proper to be held; and this being a self-evident truth, growing out of the divinely implanted principles of human nature, any custom or authority adverse to it, whether modern or wearing the hoary sanction of antiquity, is to be regarded as self-evident falsehood, and at war with the interests of mankind. 

Can any of us read that and not think that we’d like to apply it to everyone? Because here’s my thing about civil rights—I don’t think you can fight for one isolated component of them and get enough traction to make change at an exponential level. When you start talking equality, you start talking about everybody. I get really agitated when I reflect on how Abolition and The Suffrage Movement were so intertwined in the beginning. White women of means were one of the first groups to champion abolition as a cause. That’s because 1. they had money and access to important people and 2. they had time—everybody else was too busy working for a buck and trying to keep their families together and escape to freedom. It’s like Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins. She’s got all sorts of time and money to get prettied up and head off to the rally, but the housekeeper (who probably could have really used fair wages etc.) well, she was busy keeping house.

Fast forward a few years and there was a second convention in Worcester, MA called the National Women’s Rights Convention where the right to vote took center stage. I say this because it is again important to note how slowly things progressed. Both conventions were then held annually until the country switched focus to the Civil War. 

And that’s where I get agitated again. Why are we talking about race and sex like they aren’t related issues? That takes too much time. And, our power in numbers is so much greater when we attack equality as a singular focus. I know it’s a bit of a slippery slope argument—but think about it this way: In the LGBT Movement, do we really think the best approach is to let Lesbian African American women advance the cause one way while Gay Asian American men take a different course of actions? That’s fractured and fragmented and doesn’t handle a big problem with big picture thinking. 

There is still a lot of work to be done. Women alone can’t fight this on our own backs. And we can’t afford to squabble about line items amongst ourselves. We need brothers and sisters working together to get this done right. And we’re out there. We showed up in this last election. It’s time to take that collective energy, that collective we WILL move forward sentiment and do it. Whether you believe in God or Nature or both—there is a delicate balance in our world that intrinsically says one thing is not better than another, but that both things are necessary to our existence. Apples are good and oranges are good. One’s not better than another. And, if you want a good fruit salad, you’ll make room in the bowl for both.

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About the author

Korri Piper has a Bachelor’s Degree in English with a concentration in The Dramatic Arts and holds a Graduate Certificate from the Program for Women in Politics and Public Policy. For more than 11 years she has worked in the field of marketing in varied industries. Korri is fascinated by behavioral sociology. She enjoys staying active, the continued pursuit of knowledge and consideration and righteous social justice work. Korri is parent to an incredibly precocious daughter who reminds her – regularly – that life offers infinite proof of our fallibility, that humor is just a good approach to being and that active listening is the best base for relationships.