University of Virginia Library

FIRST WOMAN'S RIGHTS CONVENTION.

The children came rapidly, she was overburdened by the cares of a large house with such inefficient help as alone was possible in a small place like Seneca Falls, N. Y., and she witnessed all about her the sufferings of women from cruel laws, intemperance, poverty, and unwelcome motherhood. She said of that time:

"My experience at the World's Convention, all I had learned of the legal status of woman, and the oppression I saw everywhere, together swept across my soul, intensified now by many personal experiences. It seemed as if all the elements had conspired to impel me to some onward step. I could not see what to do or where to begin, — my only thought was a public meeting for protest and discussion. In this tempest-tossed condition of mind I received an invitation to spend the day with Lucretia Mott, who was attending Yearly Meeting in Waterloo. There I met a number of Friends, — earnest, thoughtful women, — and I poured out the torrent of my long accumulating discontent with such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself, as well as the rest of the party, to do and dare anything, and we decided then and there to call a Woman's Rights Convention."

The story of this convention, — which met in Seneca Falls, July 19-20, 1848, — is familiar,

with its remarkable declaration of sentiments and set of resolutions, demanding for woman every legal and civil right which has since been granted, and the additional right of the franchise, which is still largely withheld. Mrs. Stanton often said afterward that, with all her courage, if she could have had the slightest premonition of the storm of ridicule and denunciation which followed, she never would have dared risk it.