The First Women’s Rights Conventions

In 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, 240 women and men met for the very first women’s rights convention. This group issued a women’s Declaration of Independence.

From that gathering, women’s rights pioneers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Abby Kelley, Lucretia Mott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott and William Lloyd Garrison planned a national convention that was held in Worcester, MA in 1850. More than 1,000 delegates from eleven different states attended

Speakers:

• ·         Lucy Stone called for giving women the right to own property and to vote.
• ·         Abby Price argued for women’s equal access to trades and professions.
• ·         Dr. Harriet Hunt insisted on women’s right to higher education.
• ·         Sojourner Truth spoke of the plight of slave women.

Newspapers across the nation mocked the convention and the people seeking more rights for women but just being in the paper brought the issue to the forefront and helped bring converts to the cause.

Ask yourself if you would have stepped forward and attended these conventions.

Have you ever wondered how your neighbors view you?

I found a recent "Mass Moments" very interesting. "In 1882, Mabel Loomis Todd recorded her impressions of her mysterious Amherst neighbor. Emily Dickinson always wore white and had her hair arranged 'as was the fashion fifteen years ago.' 'She writes the strangest poems, and very remarkable ones,' Mrs. Todd noted in her journal, adding, 'She is in many respects a genius.'" 

None of us would disagree that Emily Dickinson was a genius. Her remarkable poems are still being taught in schools. Since Dickinson lived the majority of her adult life in seclusion, one wonders how she could write such worldly material. When she died in 1886, her sister asked Mabel Todd to copy and edit the poems. In 1890 the first volume was published and the world discovered Emily Dickinson.