High School Unit II

Activity 1: The 1840s—How Things Stood for Women

After students have read the excerpts from the “Body of Liberties” and the “Declaration of Sentiments,” and answered the questions on the documents, discuss the following questions:

What were a young woman’s options as she approached adulthood at mid-century?
What obstacles stood in the way of her pursuing a course other than marriage and motherhood?
What problems are caused by limiting options for girls/women?

Document HS II-2: “Repeated Injuries on the Part of Man Toward Woman”: Excerpts from the “Declaration of Sentiments,” 1848.

In July 1848, the Philadelphia Quaker Lucretia Mott and three other women had tea with fellow abolitionist Elizabeth Cady Stanton near her home in upstate New York. After Stanton “poured out the torrent of [her] long accumulating discontent,” the five women decided to call a meeting “to discuss the social, civil and religious rights of women.” Using the Declaration of Independence as her model, Stanton, a 20-year old mother of three, drafted a Declaration of Sentiments. A week later, close to 300 women and men held a two-day meeting in the small town of Senca Falls, New York. At the closing session, 68 women and 32 men signed Stanton’s document. Excerpts follow:

…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…. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

Among them

He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.

He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.

He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men--both natives and foreigners.

Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides….

[I]f single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.

He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.

He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her….

He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life….

[W]e insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.

Quoted in Concise History of Woman Suffrage, ed. by Mari Jo and Paul Buhle (University of Illinois Press, 1978).

Questions:

Based on these excerpts, what rights did American women have in 1848?
Which rights were denied women? Why?
Why did Stanton use the Declaration of Independence as her model?
What is the tone of the Declaration of Sentiments? How might the tone have affected the way the document was received? Why do you think Stanton chose this tone?