Woman's Rights Convention in Penn Yan

On January 10, 1855, the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Penn Yan was the site of a woman’s rights convention modeled on the Seneca Falls convention seven years earlier. (Nineteenth-century practice was to use the singular, woman's, when referring to women as a class; later practice was to use the plural, women's). The principal speakers included Susan B. Anthony, a principal leader of the suffrage movement, as well as New York-based freethought and feminist orator Ernestine L. Rose, an outspoken advocate not only of feminism but also of atheism and freethought.