Seneca Falls - Declaration of Sentiments in Boston Museum: "Women's Right's Convention" report [in] Boston Museum, for August 12, 1848.
The Woman’s Rights Conventions at Seneca Falls and Rochester:
Responses from the Press
Reactions in the press to the landmark conventions on Woman’s Rights held at Seneca Falls from July 19-20, 1848, and then at Rochester on August 2, 1848, were mixed. According to a study cited by Sally McMillen, “42 percent of the national press opposed the Convention, 28 percent were neutral, and 20 percent approved of it” (see McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement. Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 139 ff). Among the papers expressing enthusiastic support were Frederick Douglas’s North Star, which called it “one of the most interesting events of the past week,” and praised the speakers’ “brilliant talents and excellent dispositions.” The Seneca County Courier lauded the Resolutions at the end of the convention’s now famous Declaration of Sentiments as “spirited, and spicy,” and “radical.” Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, on the other hand, was more or less neutral. Some of the more vitriolic and dismissive notices of the convention were included by Stanton, Anthony, and Gage as an appendix in their History of Woman Suffrage, Vol 1 (see pp. 802 ff). The Mechanic’s Advocate of Albany, for example, in an editorial titled “Women out of their Latitude,” criticized the convention’s claims to equality as “impracticable, uncalled for, and unnecessary. . . . [Such a change] would...demoralize and degrade from their high sphere and noble destiny, women of all respectable and useful classes, and prove a monstrous injury to all mankind.” The Worcester (Mass.) Telegraph labeled the women at Seneca, “Amazons,” and the Lowell (Mass.) Courier began their article mockingly, “The women in various parts of the State have taken the field in favor of a petticoat empire. . . .” The items below provide further examples of the response to these founding events of the Woman’s Movement in America.
“Woman’s Rights Convention,” in The Boston Museum. Vo1. 1, No. 9 (week ending Saturday, August 12, 1848).
Folio; slight wear along fold.
An example of a neutral response to the Convention at Seneca Falls. Before reprinting the Declaration of Sentiments, the editors of the Museum note, “The question was discussed throughout two entire days, before a crowded and respectable audience, several gentlemen taking part in the debates. The most perfect order was preserved throughout and not one objector to the movement presented himself.”
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