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...too grossly insulting to the dignity of woman to be longer, quietly submitted to.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Keynote Address
Women's Rights Convention July 19, 1848

"Man cannot fulfill his destiny alone,
he cannot redeem his race unaided."

Eight years after they were excluded from an anti-black slavery meeting in London because they were women!, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Coffin Mott brought together a group of women from Upper New York state at the hamlet of Seneca Falls to declare their independence from gender slavery.
      ECS would spend almost 50 more years fighting for women's rights.
      This is the address that started it all.
      It was audacious in its message but also it showed that a "mere woman" could be a great orator: starting slow, using humor to draw in the audience and then dramatically illustrating her points to enlist the audience until finishing with an inspiring clarion call that rocked the rafters of the patriarchy!
      That small band of women (and a few men) who gathered July 1848 challenged the most basic U.S. social customs regarding the rights of women, that of making women virtual slaves in keeping with ancient Biblical scripture. The call for women's rights was an old one, but only a few scattered individual women or too small groups carried the cry before.
      This time women had the advantage of the news media - a media that ridiculed and laughed at them to the entertainment of men. But like all tyrants, men of the patriarchy safe behind their confident egos ignored the effect on the downtrodden. Women read the same articles and viewed the same cartoons with a different eye: here was hope! Within a few years other women's rights conventions were springing up all over the northeast and would soon spread to most other regions of the nation.
      The small, attractive woman whose name is now listed among the most influential persons of history was unknown when she stood on the platform at Wellesyn Chapel and her cause almost unknown.
      Her keynote address began the most radical social change in the history of the world, change that would directly affect the human rights of HALF THE WORLD'S POPULATION . . . . yet few histories even pause to record the first Women's Right Convention's keynote speech - the clarion call for the end of slavery - for women!


senstatu2.gifThe focal point of the National Park Service's custodianship of the area around Seneca Falls, NY where the First Women's Rights Convention was held are the life-size bronze statues of the leaders of the convention.
      The series was sculpted by Lloyd Lilllie of Boston University and installed at the NPS Seneca Falls headquarters in 1993.
      Visitors may walk among these pioneers and as the author of Women of Achievement and Herstory has done . . .to hug them and shed tears of gratitude.
      Shown on the left is Elizabeth Cady Stanton along with Lucretia Mott, Jane Hunt, Martha Wright, and MaryAnn M'Clintock, the primary organizers of the convention. Wesleyan Methodist Chapel where the convention was held is in near ruin immediately next to the NPS headquarters. The NPS has shored up what remains of the walls and roof and is awaiting funds from the U.S. Congress to rebuild it.


Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Keynote Address:

We have met here today to discuss our rights and wrongs, civil and political, and not, as some have supposed, to go into the detail of social life alone.

We do not propose to petition the legislature to make our husbands just, generous, and courteous, to seat every man at the head of a cradle, and to clothe every woman in male attire.

None of these points, however important they may be considered by leading men, will be touched in this convention.

As to their costume, the gentlemen need feel no fear of our imitating that, for we think it in violation of every principle of taste, beauty, and dignity; notwithstanding all the contempt cast upon our loose, flowing garments, we still admire the graceful folds, and consider our costume far more artistic than theirs.
      Many of the nobler sex seem to agree with us in this opinion, for the bishops, priests, judges, banisters, and lord mayors of the first nation on the globe, and the Pope of Rome, with his cardinals, too, all wear the loose flowing robes, thus tacitly acknowledging that the male attire is neither dignified nor imposing.

No, we shall not molest you in your philosophical experiments with stocks, pants, high-heeled boots, and Russian belts.
      Yours be the glory to discover, by personal experience, how long the kneepan can resist the terrible strapping down which you impose, in how short time the well-developed muscles of the throat can be reduced to mere threads by the constant pressure of the stock, how high the heel of a boot must be to make a short man tall, and how tight the Russian belt may be drawn and yet have wind enough left to sustain life.

Gave Man Power to Imprison His Wife

But we are assembled to protest against a form of government existing without the consent of the governed to declare our right to be free as man is free, to be represented in the government which we are taxed to support, to have such disgraceful laws as give man the power to chastise and imprison his wife, to take the wages which she earns, the property which she inherits, and, in case of separation, the children of her love; laws which make her the mere dependent on his bounty.

It is to protest against such unjust laws as these that we are assembled today, and to have them, if possible, forever erased from our statute books, deeming them a shame and a disgrace to a Christian republic in the nineteenth century. We have met

To uplift woman's fallen divinity
Upon an even pedestal with man's
.

And, strange as it may seem to many, we now demand our right to vote according to the declaration of the government under which we live.
      This right no one pretends to deny.

Equality Distinct from Rights

We need not prove ourselves equal to Daniel Webster to enjoy this privilege, for the ignorant Irishman in the ditch has all the civil rights he has.
      We need not prove our muscular power equal to this same Irishman to enjoy this privilege, for the most tiny, weak, ill-shaped stripling of twenty-one has all the civil rights of the Irishman.
      We have no objection to discuss the question of equality, for we feel that the weight of argument lies wholly with us, but we wish the question of equality kept distinct from the question of rights, for the proof of the one does not determine the truth of the other.
      All white men in this country have the same rights, however they may differ in mind, body, or estate.

The Right is Ours

The right is ours. The question now is: how shall we get possession of what rightfully belongs to us?

We should not feel so sorely grieved if no man who had not attained the full stature of a Webster, Clay, Van Buren, or Gerrit Smith could claim the right of the elective franchise.
      But to have drunkards, idiots, horse-racing, rum-selling rowdies, ignorant foreigners, and silly boys fully recognized, while we ourselves are thrust out from all the rights that belong to citizens, it is too grossly insulting to the dignity of woman to be longer quietly submitted to.

Have It, We Must

The right is ours.
      Have it, we must.
      Use it, we will.

The pens, the tongues, the fortunes, the indomitable wills of many women are already pledged to secure this right.

The great truth that no just government can be formed without the consent of the governed we shall echo and re-echo in the ears of the unjust judge, until by continual coming we shall weary him. .

There seems now to be a kind of moral stagnation in our midst.
      Philanthropists have done their utmost to rouse the nation to a sense of its sins. War, slavery, drunkenness, licentiousness, gluttony, have been dragged naked before the people, and all their abominations and deformities fully brought to light, yet with idiotic laugh we hug those monsters to our breasts and rush on to destruction.

Our churches are multiplying on all sides, our missionary societies, Sunday schools, and prayer meetings and innumerable charitable and reform organizations are all in operation, but still the tide of vice is swelling, and threatens the destruction of everything, and the battlements of righteousness are weak against the raging elements of sin and death.

Woman Has Been Silenced

Verily, the world waits the coming of some new element, some purifying power, some spirit of mercy and love.
      The voice of woman has been silenced in the state, the church, and the home, but man cannot fulfill his destiny alone, he cannot redeem his race unaided. There are deep and tender chords of sympathy and love in the hearts of the downfallen and oppressed that woman can touch more skillfully than man.

The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source. It is vain to look for silver and gold from mines of copper and lead. It is the wise mother that has the wise son.

So long as your women are slaves you may throw your colleges and churches to the winds. You can't have scholars and saints so long as your mothers are ground to powder between the upper and nether millstone of tyranny and lust. How seldom, now, is a father's pride gratified, his fond hopes realized, in the budding genius of his son!

The wife is degraded, made the mere creature of caprice, and the foolish son is heaviness to his heart. Truly are the sins of the fathers visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation.

Now is the Time for Women

God, in His wisdom, has so linked the whole human family together that any violence done at one end of the chain is felt throughout its length, and here, too, is the law of restoration, as in woman all have fallen, so in her elevation shall the race be recreated.

"Voices" were the visitors and advisers of Joan of Arc. Do not "voices" come to us daily from the haunts of poverty, sorrow, degradation, and despair, already too long unheeded.

Now is the time for the women of this country, if they would save our free institutions, to defend the right to buckle on the armor that can best resist the keenest weapons of the enemy contempt and ridicule.

The same religious enthusiasm that nerved Joan of Arc to her work nerves us to ours.

Path Not Strewn With Flowers

In every generation God calls some men and women for the utterance of truth, a heroic action, and our work today is the fulfilling of what has long since been foretold by the Prophet Joel 2:28: "And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy."

We do not expect our path will be strewn with the flowers of popular applause, but over the thorns of bigotry and prejudice will be our way, and on our banners will beat the dark storm clouds of opposition from those who have entrenched themselves behind the stormy bulwarks of custom and authority, and who have fortified their position by every means, holy and unholy.

But we will steadfastly abide the result.

Unmoved we will bear it aloft.

Undauntedly we will unfurl it to the gale, for we know that the storm cannot rend from it a shred, that the electric flash will but more clearly show to us the glorious words inscribed upon it, "Equality of Rights."


NOTE: It would take women until 1920 to be ensured of the the vote under the U.S. Constituion - a campaign of 72 years. As of the year 2000 - 152 years after ECS received thunderous applause for her "Equality of Rights," we still don't have them.

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