Seneca Falls

Gab:

I can’t get Seneca Falls out of my mind. In 1848, the First Women’s Rights Convention assembled here, shaped from a conversation among friends a mere ten days before. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton confided with Lucretia Mott, did she know it would set off a movement of social change that would last over a century? Or was she simply feeling sorry for herself, a woman of high education and privilege, who found herself stuck alone in a backwater industrial town with no servants and a handful of young children while her husband traveled the country?

What would have happened if Frederick Douglass decided not to attend the Convention? Or Lucretia for that matter? Without these prominent figures present, the meeting at Wesleyan Chapel may have easily been dismissed as a gaggle of women getting together to moan and complain. Husbands, can’t you keep your wives in check? What made the local newspaper editor sympathetic to the cause? Without his published first person account of the convention, would other papers have bothered to mention it? Most chose to ridicule the meeting. But all press is good press, right?

Why aren’t we taught the Declaration of Sentiments, the document modeled on the Declaration of Independence that states that all men and women are created equal, in grade school?

What if Elizabeth Cady Stanton had stayed in Boston and continued to enjoy the intellectual and personal freedom to which she was accustomed? Would she still have championed the cause of women’s equality? Or does one need a mill in his or her backyard to understand the toil and often misery of a mill girl? Was this just a matter of the right people being at the right place at the right time?

These are the questions that have been running through my head ever since we stopped in Seneca Falls. If the site and museum were meant to challenge us to continue to question social norms and the place of women in American society, mission accomplished. 156 years later, where do we find ourselves? With the right to vote, yes. The ability to own property, yes. The right to education, yes. Equal wages for equal work? Well, as one of the displays in the museum shows in bright red LED numbers, we are still working on that one. Along with a few other issues of no small significance.

I have to admit I was primed to visit the Women’s Rights National Historic Park by, of all things, a movie on HBO. Iron-Jawed Angels told the story of Alice Paul, Rusa Wenclawska, the National Women’s Party and the Women’s Suffrage Movement. I was moved. I was energized for, well, I am still energized. These women took the Declaration of Sentiments and used it as a base for effective political advocacy. Times had changed since Elizabeth and Lucretia held the Convention, but not enough. Members of the NWP were still ridiculed, threatened and jailed. But in the end, suffrage was theirs, or should I say, ours.

This is what Democracy looks like.

The March in Washington for Women’s Rights happened the week that we visited Seneca Falls. 156 years later, are we still seeking social justice? The answer appears to be yes. The Women’s Rights National Historic Park is living history. It does not commemorate a period in time with a set beginning and end. The period is now. Dear Elizabeth, look what you began.

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