It is July 20, the 40th anniversary of the moon landing (which my two-year-old self watched on television, according to my mama, but which I do not recall), and the 161st anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Sentiments (and its accompanying Resolutions) at Seneca Falls, New York.
I’ve been teaching women’s history at Pasadena City College for a decade and a half or so, but oddly enough, today will be the first time I’m teaching my History 25B course on July 20 itself. It was only a couple of years ago that I added women’s history to my summer course repertoire; the last two July 20ths fell on non-teaching days. So today, on what promises to be the hottest day of 2009 so far, we’ll be gathering in my classroom at noonish to celebrate the day on which the feminist movement in the United States began.
It’s always tough to date the moment a revolutionary movement got underway. We mark our nation’s independence with the signing of that famous declaration in July 1776, but the revolution itself had begun more than a year earlier. The French date their revolution from July 14, though the key Oath of the Tennis Court fell nearly a month before. The civil rights movement tends to be commemorated each year around the birth of Dr. King, and not on the anniversaries of the March on Washington or the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The same ambiguity is present in American feminist history; we could look at the founding of the New York Female Moral Reform Society, or the beginnings of labor organizing in the textile mills, or to the birth of Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, or any of a dozen other key figures in the fight to win equal rights for women.
Yet there had never been anything quite like the Seneca Falls Convention, this first great gathering of women (and a handful of male allies) committed to gender justice. And in its sweeping and brave condemnation of existing power structures, in its clever homage to Jefferson’s 1776 document, and in its firm insistence that men and women are radically equal in their worth and ought also be equal participants in every station of life, the Declaration of Sentiments stands alone in its significance. The rights that American women have today — the right to vote, to be educated, to own property, to exercise sovereignty over their own flesh — trace themselves back to July 20, 1848. The status of American women, like the status of African slaves in this country, was little changed by what happened in the rebellion against Great Britain; it would take other documents and other wars to expand the electoral franchise and the right of self-determination to all.
When we gather today, we’ll read some excerpts from the Declaration of Sentiments. Some students will share about what feminism means to them, and about all that we still have left to accomplish. We’ll eat and drink and raise a glass of something legal to our foremothers who gathered in that small town in the Finger Lakes region of the Empire State 161 years ago.
And by God, all who come into my classes will remember the date July 20 for a very long time.
Thanks for remembering. Some wanted to forget even just “a few days afterward.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton recalls:
“These were the hasty initiative steps of ‘the most momentous reform that had yet been launched on the world–the first organized protest against the injustice that had brooded for ages over the character and destiny of one-half of the race.’ No words could express our astonishment on finding, a few days afterward, that what seemed to us so timely, so rational, and so sacred, should be a subject for sarcasm and ridicule to the entire press of the nation. With our Declaration of Rights and Resolutions for a text, it seemed as if every man who could wield a pen prepared a homily on “woman’s sphere.” All the journals from Maine to Texas seemed to strive with each other to see which could make our movement appear the most ridiculous. The anti-slavery papers stood by us manfully and so did Frederick Douglass, both in the convention and in his paper, The North Star, but so pronounced was the popular voice against us, in the parlor, press, and pulpit, that most of the ladies who had attended the convention and signed the declaration, one by one, withdrew their names and influence and joined our persecutors. Our friends gave us the cold shoulder and felt themselves disgraced by the whole proceeding.”
–Eighty Years and More (1815-1897) page 149
And here’s an image of the list of first signers (some of whom felt pressure to retract their names from the signed Declaration). Women and men today in the USA owe much to the brave ones who stood by their word:
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/images/vc006195.jpg
Thank you for this, and thank you too, J.K.
I’m sending this post and JK’s response to my DDILS (only because they actually read my emails, as opposed to my sons, who evidently think I am criticizing them when I send this stuff along.) As the “Gammas” of two perfect granddaughters, I hope they learn the history of why the world is open to them. Thanks again