ABSTRACT
To begin an essay on antebellum woman’s rights with the first explicitly woman’s rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848 would not only be a cliché but also limit the discussion of woman’s rights to a single narrative. Although an exciting yarn, at once inspiring and frustrating, the line running from Republican Motherhood to women’s prominence in the antislavery movement through woman’s rights conventions of the 1850s and on toward the woman’s suffrage movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century tells an ever narrowing and distinctly white story that continues to owe plot points to its original authors, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Women’s historians have added complexity, nuance, and dissent, but the tale of the antebellum woman’s rights movement remains largely homogeneous, a curious feature for its activists, who trained in a movement addressing racial inequality, and a distinct liability as they claimed to speak for all women.
