Editing Seneca Falls Convention (section)

== Historiography ==

In 1870, [[Paulina Wright Davis]] authored a history of the antebellum women's rights movement, ''The History of the National Woman's Rights Movement'', and received approval of her account from many of the involved suffragists including [[Lucretia Mott]] and [[Elizabeth Cady Stanton]].<ref name=Isenberg5/> Davis' version gave the Seneca Falls meeting in 1848 a minor role, equivalent to other local meetings that had been held by women's groups in the late 1840s. Davis set the beginning of the national and international women's rights movement at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, at the [[National Women's Rights Convention]] when women from many states were invited, the influence of which was felt across the continent and in Great Britain.<ref name=Isenberg5/> Stanton seemed to agree; in an address to the [[National Woman Suffrage Association]] (NWSA) convention in 1870, on the subject of the women's rights movement, she said "The movement in England, as in America, may be dated from the first National Convention, held at Worcester, Mass., October, 1850."<ref>Worcester Women's History Project. [http://www.wwhp.org/Resources/WomansRights/why1850.html ''Why Commemorate the 1850 Woman's Rights Convention?''], Retrieved on May 1, 2009.</ref>

In 1876, in the spirit of the nation's centennial celebrations, Stanton and [[Susan B. Anthony]] decided to write a more expansive history of the women's rights movement. They invited [[Lucy Stone]] to help, but Stone declined to be part of the project; she was of the opinion that Stanton and Anthony would not fairly portray the divisive split between NWSA and [[American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA)]]. Stanton and Anthony wrote without her and, in 1881, they published the first volume of the ''History of Woman Suffrage'', and placed themselves at each of its most important events, marginalizing Stone's contribution.<ref>Kerr, Andrea Moore, Ph.D. (2002) [https://web.archive.org/web/20070927210618/http://www.thetrustees.org/documents.cfm?documentID=194 ''Lucy Stone and Coy's Hill.''] The Trustees of Reservations. Archived on September 27, 2007. Retrieved on January 22, 2010.</ref>

According to Lisa Tetrault, a professor of women's history, the Seneca Falls Convention was central to their rendition of the movement's history. Neither Stanton nor Anthony had been at the 1850 convention, which was associated with their rivals. Stanton, however, had played a key role at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, at which Stone had not been present. In the early 1870s, Stanton and Anthony began to present Seneca Falls as the beginning of the women's rights movement, an origin story that downplayed Stone's role. Pointing out that the women's rights movement could be said to have begun even earlier than Seneca Falls, Tetrault said the ''History of Woman Suffrage'' dealt with these earlier events relatively briefly in its first three chapters, the first of which is titled "Preceding Causes."<ref>Tetrault (2014), [https://books.google.com/books?id=ZYZgAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA71 pp. 71, 121, 137].
Tetrault says she describes the Seneca Falls story as a "myth" not to indicate that it is false but in the technical sense of "a venerated and celebrated story used to give meaning to the world." See Tetrault (2014), [https://books.google.com/books?id=ZYZgAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA5 p. 5]</ref> In the volume, Stanton did not mention the Liberty Party's plank on woman suffrage pre-dating the Seneca Falls Convention by a month, and she did not describe the Worcester National Women's Rights Convention, organized by Stone and Davis in 1850, as the beginning of the women's rights movement. Rather, Stanton named the [[World Anti-Slavery Convention|1840 Anti-Slavery Convention]] in London as the birth of the "movement for woman's suffrage, in both England and America".<ref name=Isenberg5/> She positioned the Seneca Falls meeting as her own political debut, and characterized it as the beginning of the women's rights movement,<ref name=Isenberg3>Isenberg, 1998, pp. 3–4.</ref> which she called "the greatest movement for human liberty recorded on the pages of history—a demand for freedom to one-half the entire race."<ref name=McMillen102/>

Stanton worked to enshrine the Declaration of Sentiments as a foundational treatise in a number of ways, not the least of which was by imbuing the small, three-legged tea table upon which the first draft of it was composed with an importance similar to that of [[Thomas Jefferson]]'s desk upon which he wrote the [[United States Declaration of Independence|Declaration of Independence]].<ref name="Isenberg3" /> The M'Clintocks gave Stanton the table, then Stanton gave it to [[Susan B. Anthony]] on the occasion of her 80th birthday,<ref name="loc5003502">Library of Congress. American Memory. Miller NAWSA Scrapbooks, 1897–1911. [http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbcmil.scrp5003502 rbcmil scrp5003502 ''Some Interesting Objects at the Suffrage Convention'']: a news clipping with both accurate and inaccurate statements. Retrieved on April 26, 2009.</ref> though Anthony had no part in the Seneca Falls meeting.<ref name="Stanton, 1881" /> In keeping with Stanton's promotion of the table as an iconic relic, women's rights activists put it in a place of honor at the head of the casket at the funeral of Susan B. Anthony on March 14, 1906.<ref>Historywired.com. [http://historywired.si.edu/object.cfm?ID=383 ''Declaration of Sentiments Table (1848)'']. Retrieved on April 23, 2009.</ref> Subsequently, it was displayed prominently on the stage at each of the most important suffrage meetings until 1920,<ref name="loc5003502" /> even though the grievance and resolution about woman suffrage was not written on it.<ref name="Wellman192" /> The table is kept at the [[Smithsonian Institution]]'s [[National Museum of American History]] in Washington, D.C.<ref>{{cite book |last=Howe |first=Daniel Walker |title=What hath God wrought: the transformation of America, 1815–1848 |editor=David M. Kennedy |publisher=Oxford University Press, USA |location=New York |year=2007 |page=837 |isbn=978-0-19-507894-7 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0XIvPDF9ijcC&pg=PA837 |access-date=March 1, 2010}}</ref>

Lucretia Mott reflected in August 1848 upon the two women's rights conventions in which she had participated that summer, and assessed them no greater than other projects and missions she was involved with. She wrote that the two gatherings were "greatly encouraging; and give hope that this long neglected subject will soon begin to receive the attention that its importance demands."<ref name=McMillen102/>

Historian [[Gerda Lerner]] has pointed out that religious ideas provided a fundamental source for the ''Declaration of Sentiments''. Most of the women attending the convention were active in [[Quaker]] or evangelical [[Methodist]] movements. The document itself drew from writings by the evangelical Quaker [[Sarah Grimké]] to make biblical claims that God had created woman equal to man and that man had usurped God's authority by establishing "absolute tyranny" over woman.<ref>Lerner, 1998, pp. 22–23.</ref> According to author Jami Carlacio, Grimké's writings opened the public's eyes to ideas like women's rights, and for the first time they were willing to question conventional notions about the subordination of women.<ref>Carlacio, 2002.</ref>