Two days in a small chapel in upstate New York, July 1848: a few hundred reformers adopted a Declaration of Sentiments, written chiefly by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and modeled on the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming that all men and women are created equal and demanding the vote. Frederick Douglass's support was decisive in passing the suffrage resolution by a narrow margin. The meeting changed little immediately, but it is remembered as the founding moment of American women's rights — though the movement it launched was largely white and middle-class, and would later fracture over Black male suffrage.
In July 1848, in a small chapel in upstate New York, a few hundred people gathered to do something no American meeting had ever done. They issued a Declaration of Sentiments, written mostly by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that copied the words of 1776 and changed one thing: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal." It listed the wrongs done to women, who could not vote, could not keep their own wages, and lost their children and property to their husbands. Its boldest demand was the ballot, and it nearly failed; the great Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass rose to speak for it, and it passed by a narrow margin. The meeting changed almost nothing that week. Yet Seneca Falls is remembered as the birthplace of the American women's movement, the moment the nation's founding creed was rewritten to include the half it had left out.