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Freedom's Ferment
Jon Reese
One of the reform movements that arose during the freedom's ferment of the early nineteenth century was a drive for greater rights for women,
especially in the political area. Women were heavily involved in many of the reform movements of this time, but they discovered that while they did
much of the drudge work, with few exceptions (such as Dorothea Dix) they could not take leadership roles or lobby openly for their goals. Politically,
women were to be neither seen nor heard. The drudgery of daily housework and its deadening impact on the mind also struck some women as
unfair.
2 The convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848, was organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, two Quakers whose concern
for women's rights was aroused when Mott, as a woman, was denied a seat at an international antislavery meeting in London. The Seneca Falls
meeting attracted 240 sympathizers, including forty men, among them the famed former slave and abolitionist leader, Frederick Douglass. The
delegates adopted a statement, deliberately modeled on the Declaration of Independence, as well as a series of resolutions calling for women's
suffrage and the reform of marital and property laws that kept women in an inferior status.
s Very little in the way of progress came from the Seneca Falls Declaration, although it would serve for the next seventy years as the goal for which
the suffrage movement strove. Women's suffrage and nearly all of the other reforms of this era were swallowed up by the single issue of slavery and
its abolition, and women did not receive the right to vote until the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920,
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