Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments

The feminist political movement began in the nineteenth century with the call for female suffrage. At a convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848, a group of 240 people (200 women and 40 men) drafted and approved the Declaration of Sentiments. Among those present was Frederick Douglass, a former slave who was now an abolitionist leader. The convention was organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, two Quakers whose concern for women's rights was aroused when Mott was denied a seat at an international antislavery meeting in London because she was a woman. The delegates adopted a statement of women's rights, deliberately modeled on the Declaration of Independence, as well as a series of resolutions calling for women's suffrage and the reform of marital and property laws that kept women in an inferior status.