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Declaration of Sentiments
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Index of Terms
Convention
The Seneca Falls Convention was organized in a matter of days during the summer of 1848; it was attended by 300 people, nearly 100 of whom signed the Declaration. The purpose of the convention was to set forth a manifesto of women’s rights and to encourage further gatherings across the United States. This effort succeeded, and within a few years national women’s conventions became annual events. The Seneca Falls Convention thus served as a formal launch of a movement that, over many decades, won for women the rights to vote, control property, attend college, practice professions, and upend other inequalities between the sexes.
Elective Franchise
A franchise is a privilege or right extended to one or more people by a government or other organization. In the Declaration it refers specifically to the right to vote—the “elective franchise”—and more generally to privileges enjoyed by men but not by women, as in the phrase “this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country” (Paragraph 20).
Inalienable Right
The term “inalienable right” is used twice: The first time is in the preamble, which refers—using wording identical to that of the Declaration of Independence—to “certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Paragraph 2). The second usage is in the first of the sentiments that comprise the middle section of the document: “He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise” (Paragraph 4). The use of “inalienable” is meant to remind the reader that the American Revolution, and the country born of it, was based on the notion that humans have natural rights and that, as human beings, women are entitled to those rights as well.
Seneca Falls
Located in west-central New York state, the town of Seneca Falls hosted the first convention of the nascent women’s movement in America. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had recently moved with her husband to the city, and she, along with visiting orator Lucretia Mott and a group of local Quaker women, organized the convention in 1848 to protest the ill treatment of women by men. Today, Seneca Falls remains a small town—population 8,800 in 2016—and is famous as the place where the women’s movement in America was born.
Sentiments
The Declaration of Sentiments sets forth a series of concerns, or grievances, called sentiments about the treatment of women in 19th-century America. The term “sentiments” refers to feelings or attitudes that arise from the social and political abuses suffered by women. As such, the term is polite, standing in for the anger and frustration that women of the era felt about their treatment. The middle section of the Declaration contains 16 sentiments that specify these grievances; they became rallying cries of the fledgling women’s rights movement in the United States.
Vote
Inspired by the Seneca Falls Convention, the rapidly growing women’s rights movement in America quickly took the right to vote as its chief concern. Ironically, the term “vote” doesn’t appear in the Declaration; instead, it’s represented by the phrase “elective franchise.”
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