Editing Declaration of Sentiments (section)

=== Overview ===
[[Elizabeth Cady Stanton|Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s]] Declaration of Rights and Sentiments utilises similar rhetoric to the [[United States Declaration of Independence]] by [[Thomas Jefferson]], a gesture which was neither an accident nor a submissive action.<ref>Joan Hoff, Law, Gender and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 138.</ref> Such a purposeful mimicking of language and form meant that Stanton tied together the complaints of women in America with the Declaration of Independence, in order to ensure that in the eyes of the American people, such requests were not seen as overly radical.<ref>Linda K. Kerber, “FROM THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE TO THE DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS: THE LEGAL STATUS OF WOMEN IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC 1776-1848,” Human Rights 6, no, 2 (1977): 115.</ref>

Using Jefferson’s document as a model, Stanton also linked together the [[American Revolutionary War|independence of America]] from Britain with the ‘patriarchy’ in order to emphasise how both were unjust forms of governance from which people needed to be freed.<ref name=":3">Joan Hoff, ''Law, Gender and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women'' (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 76.</ref>

Therefore, through such a familiar phrasing of arguments and issues that the women of the new American republic were facing, Stanton’s use of Jefferson rhetoric can be seen as an attempt to deflect the hostility that women faced when calling for new socio-political freedoms, as well as to make the claims of women as “self-evident” as the rights given to men following from the gaining of independence from Britain.<ref>Kerber, “DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS.” 116.</ref>