Unfinished Business
On July 19-20, 1848, The Seneca Falls Convention was held, the country’s first women’s rights convention.
The convention was designed to open a conversation about women’s rights and conditions for women in society, religion, and politics. The convention’s Declaration of Sentiments directly connected women’s rights to the country’s #DeclarationofIndependence, challenging Americans to include women in the democratic experiment.
100 attendees, 68 women and 32 men, signed the #DeclarationofSentiments
It would be 70 years before women would secure the right to vote...and decades after that til the #VotingRights Act was enacted, ensuring all Americans the right to vote! And 178 years later, their work is still inspiring us to finish the job and ensure equal rights and justice for all.
📝
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half 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 these United States.”
#SenecaFalls
#Suffs
#ElizabethCadyStanton
#LucretiaMott
#FrederickDouglass
#womensrights
#ThisGirlCanMakeHERstory
#ThisGirlCanUseHerVoice
#thisgirlcanvote
#thisgirlcanchanchangetheworld
Women’s Rights National Park National Park Service
National Women’s History Museum
Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum
Women’s Suffrage National Monument Foundation