Women’s Rights and Gender Ideology, 1848–1890

The image of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention has long dominated understanding of the emergence of an official women’s rights movement in the United States. The sentimental story of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – having met eight years prior at a world antislavery convention in which antislavery men barred antislavery women from the main floor – collaborating to launch a movement offers a coherent, even poetic, origins narrative. Stanton herself solidified it in her History of Woman Suffrage:

As Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wended their way arm in arm down Great Queen Street that night … a missionary work for the emancipation of woman in ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ was then and there inaugurated.” ¹