On a summer morning in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton pushed her nephew through a window so that he could unlock the church that would be the site of the first Women’s Rights Convention. With that simple preparation, on the morning of July 19, the roads to the church were jammed with carriages and carts. A crowd was milling around outside when Stanton arrived to find the church inadvertently locked and the key missing. The first day of the meeting was to be for women only, but Stanton and the others did not know how to ask the men who were present to leave. The convention had strong support from some men. In fact, the women asked a man to preside at the convention. 


For Stanton, then thirty-two, it was only her second public appearance. In the convention’s first order of business, she read the declaration of Sentiments. The document detailed the ways in which women were denied property rights, rights in marriage and divorce, and the vote. The Declaration of Sentiments was …show more content…
It was extensively debated and only narrowly approved. The ninth resolution called for women to have the vote. Most of the convention’s organizers had argued against including a call for woman suffrage. Lucretia Mott, then fifty-two and a noted abolitionist, feared that asking for the vote would make the meeting “look ridiculous.” But Stanton argued that the vote was essential if women were to take their place in the world. A Philadelphia newspaper said that outside of the role of wife and mother, women had no rights. “A woman is a nobody. A wife is everything. A pretty girl is equal to ten thousand men, and a mother is, next to God, all powerful.” The negative response surprised the convention’s organizers. They “were neither sour old maids, childless women, nor divorced wives, as the newspapers declared,” Stanton said. But rather they had “souls large enough to feel the wrongs of