What did women do to win equal rights? For women such as Lucretia Mott, causes such as abolition and women's rights were linked. Like many other women reformers, Mott was a Quaker. Quaker women enjoyed an unusual degree of equality in their communities. Mott was actively involved in helping runaway enslaved workers. She organized the Philadelphia Female AntiÂSlavery Society. At an antislavery convention in London, Mott met Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The two found they also shared an interest in women's rights. The Seneca Falls Convention In July 1848, Stanton and Mott helped organize the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. About 300 people, including 40 men, attended. A highlight of the convention was debate over a Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions. These resolutions called for an end to laws that discriminated against women. They also demanded that women be allowed to enter the allÂmale world of trades, professions, and businesses. The most controversial issue, however, was the call for woman suffrage, or the right to vote in elections. Elizabeth Stanton insisted the resolutions include a demand for woman suffrage. Some delegates worried that the idea was too radical. Mott told her friend, "Lizzie, thee will make us ridiculous." Standing with Stanton, Frederick Douglass argued powerfully for women's right to vote. After a heated debate, the convention voted to include in their declaration the demand for woman suffrage in the United States. The Seneca Falls Declaration The first women's rights convention called for women's equality and for their right to vote, to speak publicly, and to run for office. The convention issued a Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions modeled on the Declaration of Independence. Just as Thomas Jefferson had in 1776, women are announcing the need for revolutionary change based on a claim of basic rights: "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto [before] occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course." In this passage, two important words—and women—are added to Thomas Jefferson's famous phrase: "We hold these truths to be selfÂevident: that all men and women are created equalÍľ that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rightsÍľ that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. . . ." The women's declaration called for an end to laws that discriminated against women. It demanded that women be free to enter the allÂmale world of trades, professions, and businesses. "The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and [wrongful takings of power] on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. . . . Now, in view of this entire [withholding of rights] of oneÂhalf the people of this country, their social and religious degradation, —in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States." —Seneca Falls Convention Declaration of Sentiments The Women's Movement Grows The Seneca Falls Convention helped launch a wider movement. In the years to come, reformers held several nationa
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