"...this
is my first speech.
It contains all I knew at that time; I give this
manuscript to my precious daughters in the hopes
that they will finish the work that I have begun."
-- Elizabeth Cady
Stanton
Remarks by the
First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton
150th Anniversary of the First Women's
Rights Convention
Seneca Falls, New York
July 16, 1998
Thank
you for gathering here in such numbers for this important celebration.
I want to thank Governor Pataki and Congresswoman
Slaughter and all the elected officials who are here with us today.
I want to thank Mary Anne and her committee
for helping to organize such a great celebration.
I want to thank Bob Stanton and the entire
Park Service staff for doing such an excellent job with the historic site.
I want to thank our choirs. I thought the choirs
really added; I want to thank our singers whom we've already heard from
and will hear from because this is a celebration and we need to think about
it in such terms.
But for a moment, I would like you to take your
minds back a hundred and fifty years. Imagine if you will that you are
Charlotte Woodward, a nineteen-year-old glove maker working and living
in Waterloo.
Everyday you sit for hours sewing gloves together,
working for small wages you cannot even keep, with no hope of going on
in school or owning property, knowing that if you marry, your children
and even the clothes on your body will belong to your husband.
But then one day in July, 1848, you hear about
a women's rights convention to be held in nearby Seneca Falls. It's a convention
to discuss the social, civil, and religious conditions and rights of women.
You run from house to house and you find other women who have heard the
same news. Some are excited, others are amused or even shocked, and a few
agree to come with you, for at least the first day.
When that day comes, July 19, 1848, you leave
early in the morning in your horse-drawn wagon. You fear that no one else
will come; and at first, the road is empty, except for you and your neighbors.
But suddenly, as you reach a crossroads, you see a few more wagons and
carriages, then more and more all going towards Wesleyan Chapel.
Eventually you join the others to form one
long procession on the road to equality.
Who were the others traveling that road to equality,
traveling to that convention?
Frederick Douglass, the former slave and great
abolitionist, was on his way there and he described the participants as
"few in numbers, moderate in resources,
and very little known in the world. The most we had to connect us was a
firm commitment that we were in the right and a firm faith that the right
must ultimately prevail."
In the wagons and carriages, on foot or horseback,
were women like Rhoda Palmer. Seventy years later in 1918, at the age of
one-hundred and two, she would cast her first ballot in a New York state
election.
Also traveling down that road to equality was
Susan Quinn, who at fifteen will become the youngest signer of the Declaration
of Sentiments.
Catharine F. Stebbins, a veteran of activism
starting when she was only twelve going door to door collecting anti-slavery
petitions. She also, by the way, kept an anti-tobacco pledge on the parlor
table and asked all her young male friends to sign up. She was woman truly
ahead of her time, as all the participants were.
I often wonder, when reflecting back on the Seneca
Falls Convention, who of us - men and women - would have left our homes,
our families, our work to make that journey one hundred and fifty years
ago.
Think about the incredible courage it must
have taken to join that procession. Ordinary men and women, mothers and
fathers, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives, friends and neighbors.
And just like those who have embarked on other
journeys throughout American history, seeking freedom or escaping religious
or political persecution, speaking out against slavery, working for labor
rights.
These men and women were motivated by dreams
of better lives and more just societies.
At the end of the two-day convention, one hundred
people, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men, signed the Declaration
of Sentiments that you can now read on the wall at Wesleyan Chapel.
Among the signers were some of the names we
remember today: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, Martha Wright
and Frederick Douglass and young Charlotte Woodward. The "Seneca Falls
100," as I like to call them, shared the radical idea that America
fell far short of her ideals stated in our founding documents, denying
citizenship to women and slaves.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who is frequently credited
with originating the idea for the Convention, knew that women were not
only denied legal citizenship, but that society's cultural values and social
structures conspired to assign women only one occupation and role, that
of wife and mother.
Of course, the reality was always far different.
Women have always worked, and worked both in the home and outside the home
for as long as history can record.
And even though Stanton herself had a comfortable
life and valued deeply her husband and seven children, she knew that she
and all other women were not truly free if they could not keep wages they
earned, divorce an abusive husband, own property, or vote for the political
leaders who governed them.
Stanton was inspired, along with the others
who met, to rewrite our Declaration of Independence, and they boldly asserted,
"We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are
created equal."
"All men and all women." It was the
shout heard around the world, and if we listen, we can still hear its echoes
today.
We can hear it in the voices of women demanding
their full civil and political rights anywhere in the world.
I've heard such voices and their echoes from
women, around the world, from Belfast to Bosnia to Beijing, as they work
to change the conditions for women and girls and improve their lives and
the lives of their families.
We can even hear those echoes today in Seneca
Falls.
We come together this time not by carriage,
but by car or plane, by train or foot, and yes, in my case, by bus. We
come together not to hold a convention, but to celebrate those who met
here one hundred and fifty years ago, to commemorate how far we have traveled
since then, and to challenge ourselves to persevere on the journey that
was begun all those many years ago.
We are, as one can see looking around this great
crowd, men and women, old and young, different races, different backgrounds.
We come to honor the past and imagine the future. That is the theme the
President and I have chosen for the White House Millennium Council's efforts
to remind and inspire Americans as we approach the year 2000.
This is my last stop on the Millennium Council's
tour to Save America's Treasures - those buildings, monuments, papers and
sites - that define who we are as a nation. They include not only famous
symbols like the Star Spangled Banner and not only great political leaders
like George Washington's revolutionary headquarters, or creative inventors
like Thomas Edison's invention factory, but they include also the women
of America who wrote our nation's past and must write its future.
Women like the ones we honor here and, in fact,
at the end of my tour yesterday, I learned that I was following literally
in the footsteps of one of them, Lucretia Mott, who, on her way to Seneca
Falls, stopped in Auburn to visit former slaves and went on to the Seneca
Nations to meet with clan mothers, as I did.
Last evening, I visited the home of Mary Ann and
Thomas M'Clintock in Waterloo, where the Declaration of Sentiments
was drafted, and which the Park Service is planning to restore for visitors
if the money needed can be raised. I certainly hope I can return here sometime
in the next few years to visit that restoration.
Because we must tell and retell, learn and relearn,
these women's stories, and we must make it our personal mission, in our
everyday lives, to pass these stories on to our daughters and sons.
Because we cannot - we must not - ever forget
that the rights and opportunities that we enjoy as women today were not
just bestowed upon us by some benevolent ruler. They were fought for, agonized
over, marched for, jailed for and even died for by brave and persistent
women and men who came before us.
Every time we buy or sell or inherit property
in our own name - let us thank the pioneers who agitated to change the
laws that made that possible.
Every time, every time we vote, let us thank the
women and men of Seneca Falls, Susan B. Anthony and all the others, who
tirelessly crossed our nation and withstood ridicule and the rest to bring
about the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.
Every time we enter an occupation - a profession
of our own choosing and receive a paycheck that reflect earnings equal
to a male colleague, let us thank the signers and women like Kate Mullaney,
who's house I visited yesterday, in Troy, New York
Every time we elect a woman to office - let us
thank ground breaking leaders like Jeannette Rankin and Margaret Chase
Smith, Hattie Caraway, Louise Slaughter, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm
- all of whom proved that a woman's place is truly in the House, and in
the Senate, and one day, in the White House, as well.
And every time we take another step forward for
justice in this nation--let us thank extraordinary women like Harriet Tubman,
who's home in Auburn I visited yesterday, and who escaped herself from
slavery, and, then risked her life, time and again, to bring at least two
hundred other slaves to freedom as well.
Harriet Tubman's rule for all of her underground
railroad missions was to keep going. Once you started - no matter how scared
you got, how dangerous it became - you were not allowed to turn back.
That's a pretty good rule for life.
It not only describes the women who gathered
in Wesleyan Chapel in 1848, but it could serve as our own motto for today.
We, too, cannot turn back. We, too, must keep
going in our commitment to the dignity of every individual - to women's
rights as human rights. We are on that road of the pioneers to Seneca Falls,
they started down it 150 years ago.
But now, we too, must keep going.
We may not face the criticism and derision they
did. They understood that the Declaration of Sentiments would create
no small amount of misconception, or misrepresentation and ridicule; they
were called mannish women, old maids, fanatics, attacked personally by
those who disagreed with them. One paper said, "These
rights for women would bring a monstrous injury to all mankind."
If it sounds familiar, it's the same thing
that's always said when women keep going for true equality and justice.
Those who came here also understood that the convention
and the Declaration were only first steps down that road.
What matters most is what happens when everyone
packs up and goes back to their families and communities.
What matters is whether sentiment and resolutions,
once made, are fulfilled or forgotten.
The Seneca Falls one hundred pledged themselves
to petition, and lit the pulpit and used every instrumentality within their
power to affect their subjects. And they did. But they also knew they were
not acting primarily for themselves.
They knew they probably would not even see
the changes they advocated in their own lifetime. In fact, only Charlotte
Woodward lived long enough to see American women finally win the right
to vote.
Those who signed that Declaration were doing it
for the girls and women - for us - those of us in the twentieth century.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote a letter to her daughters
later in life enclosing a special gift and explaining why.
"Dear Maggie and Hattie, this is my first
speech. It contains all I knew at that time; I give this manuscript to
my precious daughters in the hopes that they will finish the work that
I have begun."
And they have.
Her daughter, Harriot Blatch, was the chief
strategist of the suffrage movement in New York. Harriot's daughter, Nora
Barney, was one of the first women to be a civil engineer. Nora's daughter,
Rhoda Jenkins, became an architect. Rhoda's daughter, Colleen Jenkins-Sahlin
is an elected official in Greenwich, Connecticut. And her daughter, Elizabeth
is a thirteen-year-old, who wrote about the six generations of Stantons
in a book called, 33 Things Every Girl Should Know.
So, far into the twentieth century, the work is
still being done; the journey goes on.
Now, some might say that the only purpose of
this celebration is to honor the past, that the work begun here is finished
in America, that young women no longer face legal obstacles to whatever
education or employment choices they choose to pursue. And I certainly
believe and hope all of you agree that we should, everyday, count our blessings
as American women.
I know how much change I have seen in my own life.
When I was growing up back in the fifties and sixties, there were still
barriers that Mrs. Stanton would have recognized - scholarships I couldn't
apply for, schools I couldn't go to, jobs I couldn't have - just because
of my sex.
Thanks to federal laws like the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 and Title 9, and the Equal Pay Act, legal barriers to equality
have fallen.
But if all we do is honor the past, then I believe
we will miss the central point of the Declaration of Sentiments,
which was, above all, a document about the future.
The drafters of the Declaration imagined
a different future for women and men, in a society based on equality and
mutual respect.
It falls to every generation to imagine the
future, and it our task to do so now.
We know that, just as the women 150 years ago
knew, that what we imagine will be principally for our daughters and sons
in the 21st century.
Because the work of the Seneca Falls Convention
is, just like the work of the nation itself, it's never finished, so long
as there remain gaps between our ideals and reality.
That is one of the great joys and beauties
of the American experiment. We are always striving to build and move toward
a more perfect union, that we on every occasion keep faith with our founding
ideals, and translate them into reality.
So what kind of future can we imagine together.
If we are to finish the work begun here - then
no American should ever again face discrimination on the basis of gender,
race or sexual orientation anywhere in our country.
If we are to finish the work begun here - then
$0.76 in a woman's paycheck for every dollar in a man's is still not enough.
Equal pay for equal work can once and for all be achieved.
If we are to finish the work begun here - then
families need more help to balance their responsibilities at work and at
home. In a letter to Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton writes, "Come
here and I will do what I can to help you with your address, if you will
hold the baby and make the pudding."
Even then, women knew we had to have help with
child care. All families should have access to safe, affordable, quality
child care.
If we are to finish the work begun here - then
women and children must be protected against what the Declaration
called the "chastisement of women," namely domestic abuse and
violence.
We must take all steps necessary to end the
scourge of violence against women and punish the perpetrator.
And our country must join the rest of the world,
as so eloquently Secretary Albright called for on Saturday night here in
Seneca Falls, "Join the rest of the world
and ratify the convention on the elimination of discrimination against
women."
If we are to finish the work begun here - we must
do more than talk about family values, we must adopt polices that truly
value families - policies like a universal system of health care insurance
that guarantees every American's access to affordable, quality health care.
Policies like taking all steps necessary to
keep guns out of the hands of children and criminals.
Policies like doing all that is necessary at
all levels of our society to ensure high quality public education for every
boy or girl no matter where that child lives.
If we are to finish the work begun here - we must
ensure that women and men who work full-time earn a wage that lifts them
out of poverty and all workers who retire have financial security in their
later years through guaranteed Social Security and pensions.
If we are to finish the work begun here - we must
be vigilant against the messages of a media- driven consumer culture that
convinces our sons and daughters that what brand of sneakers they wear
or cosmetics they use is more important that what they think, feel, know,
or do.
And if we are to finish the work begun here -
we must, above all else, take seriously the power of the vote and use it
to make our voices heard.
What the champions of suffrage understood was
that the vote is not just a symbol of our equality, but that it can be,
if used, a guarantee of results.
It is the way we express our political views.
It is the way we hold our leaders and governments
accountable.
It is the way we bridge the gap between what
we want our nation to be and what it is.
But when will the majority of women voters of
our country exercise their most fundamental political right?
Can you imagine what any of the Declaration
signers would say if they learned how many women fail to vote in elections?
They would be amazed and outraged. They would agree with a poster I saw
in 1996. On it, there is a picture of a woman with a piece of tape covering
her mouth and under it, it says, "Most
politicians think women should be seen and not heard. In the last election,
54 million women agreed with them."
One hundred and fifty years ago, the women at
Seneca Falls were silenced by someone else. Today, women, we silence ourselves.
We have a choice.
We have a voice.
And if we are going to finish the work begun
here we must exercise our right to vote in every election we are eligible
to vote in.
Much of who women are and what women do today
can be traced to the courage, vision, and dedication of the pioneers who
came together at Seneca Falls. Now it is our responsibility to finish the
work they began.
Let's ask ourselves, at the 200th anniversary
of Seneca Falls, will they say that today's gathering also was a catalyst
for action?
Will they say that businesses, labor, religious
organizations, the media, foundations, educators, every citizen in our
society came to see the unfinished struggle of today as their struggle?
Will they say that we joined across lines of race
and class, that we raised up those too often pushed down, and ultimately
found strength in each other's differences and resolved in our common cause?
Will we, like the champions at Seneca Falls,
recognize that men must play a central role in this fight?
How can we ever forget the impassioned plea
of Frederick Douglass, issued in our defense of the right to vote?
How can we ever forget that young legislator from
Tennessee by the name of Harry Burns, who was the deciding vote in ratifying
the 19th Amendment. He was planning on voting "no," but then
he got a letter from his mother with a simple message. The letter said,
"Be a good boy Harry and do the right
thing."
And he did!
Tennessee became the last state to ratify,
proving that you can never ever overestimate the power of one person to
alter the course of history, or the power of a little motherly advice.
Will we look back and see that we have finally
joined the rest of the advanced economies by creating systems of education,
employment, child care and health care that support and strengthen families
and give all women real choices in their lives.
At the 200th anniversary celebration, will they
say that women today supported each other in the choices we make?
Will we admit once and for all there is no
single cookie cutter model for being a successful and fulfilled woman today,
that we have so many choices? We can choose full-time motherhood or no
family at all or like most of us, seek to strike a balance between our
family and our work, always trying to do what is right in our lives.
Will we leave our children a world where it
is self-evident that all men and women, boys and girls are created equal?
These are some of the questions we can ask
ourselves.
Help us imagine a future that keeps faith with
the sentiments expressed here in 1848.
The future, like the past and the present,
will not and cannot be perfect.
Our daughters and granddaughters will face
new challenges which we today cannot even imagine.
But each of us can help prepare for that future
by doing what we can to speak out for justice and equality for women's
rights and human rights, to be on the right side of history, no matter
the risk or cost, knowing that eventually the sentiments we express and
the causes we advocate will succeed because they are rooted in the conviction
that all people are entitled by their creator and by the promise of America
to the freedom, rights, responsibilities, and opportunity of full citizenship.
That is what I imagine for the future.
I invite you to imagine with me and then to
work together to make that future a reality.
Thank you all very much.
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