Historiography
In 1870, Paulina Wright Davis authored a history of the antebellum women's rights movement, and received approval of her account from many of the involved suffragists including Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. 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. 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."
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, Stanton published the first volume of the History of Woman Suffrage, and placed herself at each of its most important events, marginalizing Stone's contribution. 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 1840 Anti-Slavery Convention in London as the birth of the "movement for woman's suffrage, in both England and America". She positioned the Seneca Falls meeting as her own political debut, and characterized it as the beginning of the women's rights movement, calling it "the greatest movement for human liberty recorded on the pages of history—a demand for freedom to one-half the entire race." 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 an importance similar to that of Thomas Jefferson's desk upon which he wrote the Declaration of Independence. The M'Clintocks gave Stanton the table, then Stanton gave it to Susan B. Anthony on the occasion of her 80th birthday, though Anthony had no part in the Seneca Falls meeting. 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. Subsequently, it was displayed prominently on the stage at each of the most important suffrage meetings until 1920, even though the grievance and resolution about woman suffrage was not written on it. The table is kept at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
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."
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. 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.
Read more about this topic: Seneca Falls Convention