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4. The Meaning of Seneca Falls
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chapter four The Meaning of Seneca Falls / This chapter and the next deal with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 and the political and social movement it engendered as an event of major significance, both in the past and in the present. In this chapter I try to place the event in its proper historical setting.* In Chapter 5 I deal more closely with the practical lessons applicable to today’s struggles that can be drawn from it. The French Revolution, with its proclamation of the “rights of man,” has been deservedly treated by historians as a major event in world history. Not so for the Seneca Falls convention, which, in fact, was the first public gathering of women to proclaim the “rights of women.” In either case, we are dealing with half of humankind; yet the Seneca Falls convention has been treated as a side issue, a footnote to history, generally mentioned only in connection with the fight for suffrage in the United States. It occurred to me while writing the essay that a comparison with another historical event that happened the same year, the publication of the Communist Manifesto, might move readers to consider the Seneca Falls convention in its proper significance. Both events offered utopian and practical propositions in order to remedy societal evils. Both led to the creation of vast, long-lasting mass movements. Marxism foresaw revolution as the inevitable means for changing society; feminism demanded societal, institutional, and intensely personal changes to be won through persuasion—a vast cultural transformation . Comparing the worldwide results more than 150 years later might lead us to new insights into the strategy and tactics of making social change. In 1848, according to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “a specter [was] haunting Europe—the specter of communism.” In that same year, the upstate New York village of Seneca Falls hosted a gathering of fewer than 300 people, earnestly debating a Declaration of Sentiments to be spread by newsprint and oratory. The Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention marked the beginning of the woman’s rights movement. The specter that haunted Europe developed into a mighty movement, embracing the globe, causing revolutions, wars, tyrannies, and counter- *This article originally appeared in Dissent (Fall 1998): 35–41. 74 DOING HISTORY revolutions. Having gained state power in Russia, China, and Eastern Europe, twentieth-century Communism, in 1948, seemed more threatening a specter than ever before.Yet, after a bitter period of “cold war,” which pitted nuclear nations against one another in a futile stalemate, it fell of its own weight in almost all its major centers. The small spark figuratively ignited at Seneca Falls never produced revolutions, usurpation of power, or wars. Yet it led to a transformation of consciousness and a movement of empowerment on behalf of half the human race, which hardly has its equal in human history. Until very recently, the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 was not recognized as significant by historians, not included in history textbooks, not celebrated as an important event in public schools, never mentioned in the media or the press. In the 1950s, the building where it was held, formerly the Wesleyan chapel, was used as a filling station. In the 1960s, it housed a laundromat. It was only due to the resurgence of modern feminism and the advances of the field of Women’s History that the convention has entered the nation’s consciousness.The establishment of Women’s History Month as a national event during the Carter administration and its continuance through every administration since then has helped to educate the nation to the significance of women’s role in history. Still, it took decades of struggle by women’s organizations, feminist historians, and preservationists to rescue the building at Seneca Falls and finally to persuade the National Park Service to turn it into a historic site. Today it is a major tourist attraction and has been enhanced by the establishment of a National Women’s Hall of Fame on the site. This history of “long forgetting and short remembering” has been an important aspect of women’s historic past, the significance of which we only understood as we began to study women’s history in depth. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the great communicator and propagandist of nineteenth-century feminism, has left a detailed account of the origins of the Seneca Falls convention both in her autobiography and in the monumental History of Woman Suffrage.1 The idea for such a meeting originated with...