Editing Seneca Falls Convention (section)

=== Women's rights ===

In 1839 in Boston, [[Margaret Fuller]] began hosting conversations, akin to French [[Salon (gathering)|'' salons'']], among women interested in discussing the "great questions" facing their sex.<ref>Marshall, Megan. ''The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism''. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005: 387. {{ISBN|978-0-618-71169-7}}</ref> [[Sophia Ripley]] was one of the participants. In 1843, Fuller published ''[[The Great Lawsuit]]'', asking women to claim themselves as self-dependent.<ref>{{cite web |title=Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) |url=https://www.learner.org/series/american-passages-a-literary-survey/spirit-of-nationalism/margaret-fuller-1810-1850/ |website=learner.org |access-date=2 April 2021}}</ref>

In the 1840s, women in America were reaching out for greater control of their lives. Husbands and fathers directed the lives of women, and many doors were closed to female participation.<ref name="nps quakers"/> State statutes and [[common law]] prohibited women from inheriting property, signing contracts, serving on juries and voting in elections. Women's prospects in employment were dim: they could expect only to gain a very few service-related jobs and were paid about half of what men were paid for the same work.<ref name="nps quakers"/> In Massachusetts, [[Brook Farm]] was founded by Sophia Ripley and her husband [[George Ripley (transcendentalist)|George Ripley]] in 1841 as an attempt to find a way in which men and women could work together, with women receiving the same compensation as men. The experiment failed.<ref>Hankins, 2004, p. 34.</ref>

In the fall of 1841, Elizabeth Cady Stanton gave her first public speech, on the subject of the [[Temperance movement]], in front of 100 women in Seneca Falls. She wrote to her friend Elizabeth J. Neal that she moved both the audience and herself to tears, saying "I infused into my speech a Homeopathic dose of woman's rights, as I take good care to do in many private conversations."<ref>Stanton, 1997, p. 25.</ref>

Lucretia Mott met with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Boston in 1842, and discussed again the possibility of a woman's rights convention.<ref name=Wellman188>Wellman, 2004, p. 188</ref> They talked once more in 1847, prior to Stanton moving from Boston to Seneca Falls.<ref name=Isenberg3/>

Women's groups led by Lucretia Mott and Paulina Wright Davis held public meetings in Philadelphia beginning in 1846.<ref name=Isenberg5/> A wide circle of abolitionists friendly to women's rights began in 1847 to discuss the possibility of holding a convention wholly devoted to women's rights.<ref name=Isenberg5/> In October 1847, [[Lucy Stone]] gave her first public speech on the subject of women's rights, entitled ''The Province of Women'', at her brother Bowman Stone's church in [[Gardner, Massachusetts]].<ref>Emerson, Dorothy May; Edwards, June; Knox, Helene. [https://books.google.com/books?id=djpfT5rHb5MC&pg=PA32 ''Standing Before Us''], Skinner House Books, 2000, p. 32.</ref>

In March 1848, Garrison, the Motts, [[Abby Kelley Foster]], [[Stephen Symonds Foster]] and others hosted an Anti-Sabbath meeting in Boston, to work toward the elimination of laws that apply only to Sunday, and to gain for the laborer more time away from toil than just one day of rest per week. Lucretia Mott and two other women were active within the executive committee,<ref>Anti-Sabbath Convention. [https://books.google.com/books?id=UxlIYw9d91kC ''Proceedings of the Anti-Sabbath Convention''], Retrieved on April 23, 2009.</ref> and Mott spoke to the assemblage. Lucretia Mott raised questions about the validity of blindly following religious and social tradition.<ref>Isenberg, 1998, pp. 87–88.</ref>