Galie Madalina, Misleanu Alexandra, Serghievici Andreea, Tunaru Daniela

Second Year, English Minor

American Civilization (seminar)

Seneca Falls Declaration

Galie Madalina

Historical Background:
-Womens rights in the 18th century were severely limited (voting, holding public
office, denial of higher education and professions etc);
- Reform movements provided middle-class women with unprecedented
opportunities (working in public, distribution of religious tracts etc);
-Although feminism first emerged within abolitionism, the discrimination
encountered
by women in the antislavery movement drove them to make womens rights a
separate cause.
-

In 1848, Lucy Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton together organized the

Seneca Falls Convention for womens rights at Seneca Falls, New York.
-

The Seneca Falls meeting attracted 240 sympathizers, including forty men,

among them the famed former slaved and abolitionist leader, Frederick
Douglass;
-

The delegates adopted a statement, deliberately modeled on the Declaration

of Independece, as well as a series of resolutions (womens suffrage and the

reform of marital and property laws).
-

Although it was not very successful (women did not receive the right to vote

until the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920) it would
serve for the next seventy years as the goal for which the suffrage movement
strove.

Tunaru Daniela

Galie Madalina, Misleanu Alexandra, Serghievici Andreea, Tunaru Daniela

Second Year, English Minor
American Civilization (seminar)

-Elizabeth Cady Stanton (November 12, 1815 October 26, 1902) was an
American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women's
rights movement.
-In 1848, she and Mott called for a women's rights convention to be held in
Seneca Falls, New York. That convention, and the Declaration of Sentiments
written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton which was approved there, is credited with
initiating the long struggle towards women's rights and woman suffrage.
-She was among those who were determined to focus on female suffrage and
also was a co-founder and president of National Woman Suffrage
Association .The organisation condemned the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
amendments as blatant injustices to women. The NWSA also advocated easier
divorce and an end to discrimination in employment and pay.
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose autobiography, Eighty Years and More, was
published in 1898, died in New York, on 26th October, 1902.

Misleanu Alexandra
Lucretia Mott: Early life and education
- Born Lucretia Coffin on January 3, 1793, in Nantucket, Massachusetts
- The second child of eight by Anna and Thomas Coffin
- At the age of 13, she attended a Quaker boarding school, Nine Partners, in Dutchess County, New

York.
- She became a teacher after graduation.
- Her interest in women's rights began when she discovered that male teachers at the school were paid

three times as much as the female staff.

Marriage and family

-

On April 10, 1811, the couple married and lived in Philadelphia.

They had six children.

Their second child died at age two. Their surviving children all became active in the anti-slavery and
other reform movements

Galie Madalina, Misleanu Alexandra, Serghievici Andreea, Tunaru Daniela

Second Year, English Minor
American Civilization (seminar)

Civil Rights Activist

1820 - a rift formed between the stricter, more conservative Quakers and the tolerant, less
orthodox followers of Elias Hicks (known as the Hicksites)
In 1827 first James and then Lucretia followed the Hicksite branch which espoused free
interpretation of the Bible and reliance on inward, as opposed to historic Christian, guidance. She often
spoke in Unitarian churches
Mott was strongly opposed to slavery, and advocated not buying the products of slave labor,
which prompted her husband, always her supporter, to get out of the cotton trade around 1830.
-

1830s Lucretia was elected as a clerk of the Philadelphia Women's Yearly Meeting

Supporter of William Lloyd Garrison and his American Anti-Slavery Society

1840- she and her husband attended the famous World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London;
met Elizabeth Cady Stanton; the Seneca Falls Convention; published her influential Discourse on
Woman (1850).
1850- she engaged in further antislavery and non-resistant activities. She worked with
Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Lucy Stone.

Free Religious Association in Boston in 1867.

Final Years
-

died on November 11, 1880 of pneumonia at her home, Roadside, in Pennsylvania.

Serghievici Andreea (text analysis)

It uses the model of the US Declaration of Independence, demanding that the rights of women as
right-bearing individuals be acknowledged and respected by society.
It was signed by sixty-eight women and thirty-two men.

Truths considered to be self-evident by the ones that signed the Declaration:

- all men and women are created equal
- they are given by God certain inalienable rights (life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness)
- governments are instituted to secure these rights and whenever these rights are not
respected, people have the right to ask for the institution of a new government

Galie Madalina, Misleanu Alexandra, Serghievici Andreea, Tunaru Daniela

Second Year, English Minor
American Civilization (seminar)

There is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman,
having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her:
- the woman doesnt have the right to vote
- the woman is forced to submit to laws in the formation of which she has no word to say
- even the most ignorant and degraded man has rights that a woman doesnt
- the woman is not represented in the halls of legislation
- the woman doesnt have the right to property
- her husband is her master and the law gives him the power to deprive her of her liberty
- in case of a divorce the laws regarding the guardianship of the children are in mans favour
- man has monopolized almost all profitable and honourable jobs
- the woman doesnt have the right to a complete education
- the woman is allowed in Church and in State, but in a subordinate position
- man has destroyed her confidence in her own powers and made her willing to lead a
dependent life

In the last part of the Declaration, those who signed it clearly ask that women be given all
the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.

Galie Madalina, Misleanu Alexandra, Serghievici Andreea, Tunaru Daniela

Second Year, English Minor
American Civilization (seminar)

Glossary
-

Abolitionism- used as a single word, was a movement to end slavery,

whether formal or informal.

-

Abolitionist - those people seeking the abolishment of any perceived

injustice to a group of people

-

Declaration of Independence : a statement adopted by the Continental

Congress on July 4, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American colonies,
then at war with Great Britain, regarded themselves as independent states, and no
longer a part of the British Empire. Instead they now formed a new nation--the
United States of America.
Declaration of Sentiments- is a document signed in 1848 by 68 women
and 32 men and 100 out of some 300 attendees at the first women's rights
convention.
-

Discourse on Woman - This lecture by Mott was in response to one by

an unidentified male lecturer criticizing the demand for equal rights for women.
She makes a very gentle appeal, here, for women's enfranchisement, placing
emphasis, instead on the injustices done to women in marriage.
-

Frederick Douglass - (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c.

February 1818 February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, orator, writer
and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist
movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. He
stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves did not
have the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Many
Northerners also found it hard to believe that such a great orator had been a slave.

Galie Madalina, Misleanu Alexandra, Serghievici Andreea, Tunaru Daniela

Second Year, English Minor
American Civilization (seminar)

The Free Religious Association - (FRA) was formed in 1867 William J.

Potter to be, in Potter's words, a "spiritual anti-slavery society" to "emancipate

religion from the dogmatic traditions it had been previously bound to."
-

George Fox - (July 1624 13 January 1691) was an English Dissenter

(English Dissenters were Christians who separated from the Church of England in
the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries) and a founder of the Religious Society of
Friends, commonly known as the Quakers or Friends.
-

Inalienable :unable to be taken away from or given away by the

possessor
-

William Lloyd Garrison - (December 10, 1805 May 24, 1879) was a

prominent American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer. He is best known

as the editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, and was one of the
founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He promoted "immediate
emancipation" of slaves in the United States. Garrison was also a prominent voice
for the women's suffrage movement.
-

Elias Hicks - (March 19, 1748 February 27, 1830) was an itinerant

Quaker preacher from Long Island, New York. He promoted doctrines that
embroiled him and followers in controversy; the Hicksites caused the first major
schism within the Religious Society of Friends.
-

Lucretia Coffin Mott (January 3, 1793 November 11, 1880) was an

American Quaker, abolitionist, a women's rights activist, and a social reformer.

-

The Nineteenth Amendment (Amendment XIX) to the United States

Constitution - prohibits any United States citizen to be denied the right to vote
based on sex.
-

William James Potter - (February 1, 1829-December 21, 1893), born in

Dartmouth, Massachusetts, was a Unitarian minister, a founder, Secretary and

President of the Free Religious Association, and President and later Editor of The
Index. For more than forty years Potter was perhaps the leading public citizen of
New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Galie Madalina, Misleanu Alexandra, Serghievici Andreea, Tunaru Daniela

Second Year, English Minor
American Civilization (seminar)

Quakers - are members of a family of religious movements which

collectively are known as either the Friends Church, or the Religious Society of
Friends.
-

Seneca a member of a Native American people, many of whom now live

in the US states on New York and Ohio

-

Social activist- tries to persuade people to change their behavior

directly, rather than to persuade governments to change or not to change laws.

-

Lucy Stone - (August 13, 1818 October 19, 1893) was a prominent

American abolitionist and suffragist, and a vocal advocate and organizer promoting
rights for women. In 1847, Stone was the first woman from Massachusetts to earn
a college degree. She spoke out for women's rights and against slavery at a time
when women were discouraged and prevented from public speaking. Stone was the
first recorded American woman to retain her own last name after marriage.
-

World's Anti-Slavery Convention, London, England, 1840 - The call

for that Convention invited delegates from all Anti-Slavery organizations.

Accordingly several American societies saw fit to send women, as delegates, to
represent them in that august assembly. But after going three thousand miles to
attend a World's Convention, it was discovered that women formed no part of the
constituent elements of the moral world. Its decision to exclude female
abolitionists dramatized the discrimination and caused Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth
Cady Stanton to resolve to hold a womans rights convention, thus making it the
starting point for the woman suffrage movement. (Douglas H. Maynard - The
World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840)
-

Woman suffrage- is the right of women to vote and to run for office.

Bibliography:

1. Boyer, Clark, Haltunnen, Kett, Salisbury, Sitkoff, Woloch The Enduring Vision, A History
of the American People, 7th edition;
2. Urofsky Basic Readings in US Democracy;

Galie Madalina, Misleanu Alexandra, Serghievici Andreea, Tunaru Daniela

Second Year, English Minor
American Civilization (seminar)

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucretia_Mott
4. http://www.biography.com/people/lucretia-mott-9416590
5. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1888877?
uid=3738920&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21101634523977
6. http://www.patheos.com/Library/Society-of-Friends-(Quaker).html
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Douglass
9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Stone
10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Dix
11. http://www.mott.pomona.edu/mott1.htm
12. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/history/dubois/classes/995/98F/doc4.html

Galie Madalina, Misleanu Alexandra, Serghievici Andreea, Tunaru Daniela

Second Year, English Minor
American Civilization (seminar)

(Postal Stamp from 1948)