Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls

The Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls served as the site for the first Woman’s Rights Convention on July 19–20, 1848, organized by (among others) Elizabeth Cady Stanton and attended by abolition activist Frederick Douglass. This convention sparked the development of first-wave feminism and the nineteenth-century woman’s rights movement, which achieved the vote for women in 1920. (Nineteenth-century practice was to use the singular, woman's, to refer to women as a class; later practice was to use the plural, women's.)

Some three hundred women and forty men attended the 1848 Woman's Rights Convention. The 1848 Convention is best known for adopting the Declaration of Sentiments, a statement of woman’s equality consciously patterned on the Declaration of Independence and signed by about 100 attendees. The Convention also adopted twelve resolutions, of which the most controversial was a then-unprecedented call for "the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise"—that is, the vote.

It is no coincidence that the Convention took place at the then-new Wesleyan Chapel. In 1843, the Wesleyan Methodist Church split from the Methodist Episcopal Church. Issues included whether to oppose slavery abstractly (a sort of bare bones abolitionism) or to engage in more radical forms of activism such as defying the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, sheltering escaped slaves, and participating in the Underground Railroad. The Wesleyans took the more radical position.

Their number included many reformers, including some who believed in equality between men and women. At that time, Seneca Falls was a particular hotbed of radical reform agitation. Seneca Falls’s Wesleyan congregation was the first to build a chapel, and for many years the Seneca Falls chapel was the largest Wesleyan chapel in New York. It was routinely made available for reform speakers and events. No facility then in Seneca Falls would have been more likely to welcome the Woman’s Rights Convention.