Seneca Falls Convention

July 19, 1848

In a Methodist chapel in upstate New York, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott convened the first women's rights convention in American history. They adopted a Declaration of Sentiments modeled on Jefferson's, demanding, most scandalously, the vote. Frederick Douglass signed it. American feminism had its founding document. The vote itself would not come for another seventy-two years, but the argument that won it was made at Seneca Falls.