Quakers remembered in suffrage anniversary

'The convention was an "iconic moment deeply shaped by Quaker beliefs on gender and equality"'

The influence of five Quaker women on the US movement for women’s suffrage was marked last month, on the 175th anniversary of its inception.

Remembering the Seneca Falls Convention in July 1848, the article in The Conversation described how Philadelphia Quaker Lucretia Mott joined with four other women – her sister Martha Wright; Jane Hunt; Mary Ann M’Clintock; and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – to organise the women’s rights convention. The latter, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was the only non-Quaker.

The Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 resulted in the Declaration of Sentiments, a document modelled on the US Declaration of Independence that asserted ‘all men and women are created equal’. According to The Conversation, the two-day conference marked ‘the beginning of the movement for women’s suffrage, which would be granted 70 years later by the ratification of the 19th Amendment of the Constitution. And it likely wouldn’t have happened without Quakers’.

Although the women agreed on the necessity of a women’s rights convention, they disagreed on the form and content, the article notes. ‘At their initial meeting, the five proposed to discuss the “social, civil, and religious condition of women” – placing women’s oppression within a larger constellation of social evils. Stanton, however, listed the lack of suffrage as woman’s most urgent grievance.’

Participants also passed twelve resolutions designed to provide for women’s equality. The convention was an ‘iconic moment deeply shaped by Quaker beliefs on gender and equality’, the article says.

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