‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’
So argues the Declaration of Sentiments, which protested the “repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.” This document was the product of the first women’s rights conference held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Modelled on the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Sentiments used the logic of the American Revolution to argue for an overthrow of the oppressive legal regime that made American women into second-class citizens. As women had no say in American government, laws oppressing them were manifestly unjust.
As women had no say in American government, laws oppressing them were manifestly unjust.
The universal language of the Declaration of Independence added fuel to the fire of the revolutionary fervour that spread throughout the Atlantic World in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Women, enslaved people, the poor and disfranchised and other marginalised groups seized on the radical potential of these ideas, applying them in contexts far beyond what most of the Founders of the United States initially imagined or anticipated.
The Declaration of Sentiments reflected years of frustrations felt by women at their exclusion from public life. Though most of the Founders took the subordination of women, enslaved people and Native Americans for granted, some political theorists expressed the view that Enlightenment ideas challenged these hierarchies and might lead to cultural, economic and social revolution.
James Otis was foremost among these radical thinkers. “If upon the abdication all were reduced to a state of nature, had not apple women and orange girls as good a right to give their respectable suffrages for a new King as the philosopher, courtier, petit-mattre, and politician?” he opined in his 1764 pamphlet, "The Rights of British Colonies Asserted and Proved." In the spring of 1776, as the Continental Congress prepared to declare independence, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, and exhorted him to “Remember the Ladies” as they formed a new government. “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands,” Adams warned. “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”
British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft gave even fuller form to the argument that Enlightenment ideas could not logically exclude women. In her 1792 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she rebutted the sexist claims of other political theorists who, like Rousseau, argued that women lacked the capacity to reason — or who failed to consider women at all.
In the United States, the political ideas embodied in the Declaration of Independence fed into a growing antislavery movement, which would spawn a separate movement for women’s rights.
At the same time, enslaved people in the Americas similarly embraced the concepts of natural liberty and equality. Many called for the abolition of slavery; in Saint-Domingue, rebellious slaves claimed it for themselves beginning in 1791.
In the United States, the political ideas embodied in the Declaration of Independence fed into a growing antislavery movement, which would spawn a separate movement for women’s rights. As women converted to the cause of abolitionism, they organised politically, joining the ranks of male-led antislavery societies. But writing petitions was not enough for some women, who demanded the right to speak in public. (After abolitionist Angelina Grimké Weld gave a speech at Pennsylvania Hall to a mixed audience of men and women in 1838, an outraged mob burned it down.) Others accosted men for their inability to abolish slavery through the political system and called for women’s suffrage.
When American abolitionists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott were denied the right to speak at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, they returned to the United States determined to challenge women’s second-class status in society. Thus was born the idea to hold the famous Seneca Falls convention in 1848. Reflecting its roots in anti-slavery activism, abolitionist Frederick Douglass attended the convention and was a signatory of the Declaration of Sentiments.
The Declaration’s primary focus was on the legal disabilities imposed on married women through the legal concept of coverture, which made husbands and wives into a single legal person. Though consent was essential to a valid marriage contract, women gave up most other rights when they wed, including the right to hold and dispose of their own property or keep the wages they earned from work. Women could not vote or hold political office, make contracts, work in most professional fields or attend the most prestigious universities. Coverture made women legally and economically dependent on their husbands.
In the end, it would take a Civil War to force the US Government to make good on its promise of natural liberty for all, and more than 50 years for the ratification of the 19th Amendment
In the end, it would take a Civil War to force the US Government to make good on its promise of natural liberty for all, and more than 50 years for the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which forbade states from denying the right to vote on account of sex. But universal suffrage would take another half century. It was not until the 1960s that the Black Freedom Struggle successfully challenged legal racial discrimination. Feminists built on these successes, winning battles to secure legal equality in the 1970s.
None of these victories were complete, but the success of movements for gender and racial equality reflect the enduring power of the concepts that human liberty and equality are self-evident and that governments derive their authority and legitimacy from the consent of the governed.
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