Standard: SS4H4. Examine the main ideas of the abolitionist and suffrage movements: Discuss contributions of, and challenges faced by Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman. 

Please read the passage and then answer the reading comprehension questions that follow to show you understanding of the passage: 

Women and the Fight for Equality

Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were women's rights activists and social reformers during the 19th century.

Lucretia Mott and her husband, James, were active in many of the reform movements of the day. Mott once organized a campaign asking people not to buy products made or raised by enslaved workers. Those products included cotton clothing, sugar, and rice. She hoped that would convince plantation owners to give up slavery. Still, despite her reform work, Mott always felt that as a woman she did not receive the same level of respect as a man. She later said that women’s rights were “the most important question of my life from a very early day.”

As for Elizabeth Cady, she learned about the unequal treatment of women very early in life. Her father was a lawyer and a judge. “Oh, my daughter,” he said on one occasion, “I wish you were a boy.” As a girl, Elizabeth could never become a lawyer like her father.

Cady resolved to show her father that she was as good as a boy. She learned to play games, such as chess, that men said were beyond the mental powers of girls and women. She studied Greek and Latin. She studied mathematics. Still, no matter how well she did, she could not go to college. Colleges were for men only. Cady had to attend a school for women in Troy, New York, instead.

After graduating, Cady became active in a number of reform movements. She soon met Henry B. Stanton, a leader in the antislavery movement. The two decided to marry. In those days, women promised to “love, honor, and obey” their husbands in the marriage vow. Elizabeth Cady insisted on removing the word obey. The Stantons spent their honeymoon in London, England, where they attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention.

This convention is where Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton first met.

At this convention, women delegates were told they could not take part and that they had to watch from the balcony. Both were angered by their treatment. By the time they left London, they had promised each other to hold a convention on women’s rights in the United States.

For eight years, nothing came of the promise. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was busy raising a family. Lucretia Mott was involved in other activities. Then on July 13, 1848, Mott visited the Stanton’s home in Seneca Falls, New York. That afternoon over a cup of tea, Stanton, Mott, and three local women decided to hold the long-delayed convention.

The next day, this notice appeared in the Seneca Country Courier newspaper: “Woman’s Rights Convention: A Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious conditions and rights of woman will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel, at Seneca Falls, N.Y.” Few would have guessed that this short announcement would start one of the biggest reform movements in U.S. history.

On July 19, six days after their initial meeting, two hundred women, and even some men, showed up at the Wesleyan Chapel. On the second day, a larger crowd of women and men attended.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton read aloud a Declaration of Sentiments she had written. The Declaration’s first words echoed another famous declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” Stanton went on to list fifteen ways that women were treated unequally.

At the end of the Declaration, Elizabeth Cady Stanton shocked the audience. She demanded that women be given the right to vote. For some reformers, that was going too far. Lucretia Mott tried to discourage her friend. Demanding the vote “will make us look ridiculous,” she said. “We must go slowly.” But Mott eventually agreed. So did a majority of the convention.

Today, it is hard to imagine anyone disagreeing with the goals of the Seneca Falls Convention. However, that was a different time. The few newspapers that paid attention to the meeting made fun of it. One laughed at the women’s demands to vote, become lawyers, and keep their own property. While they were at it, said the newspaper, they should have demanded that men “wash dishes, … handle the broom, darn stockings, … wear trinkets, [and] look beautiful.”

None of this ridicule stopped the women’s movement. After the Seneca Falls meeting, women in a half-dozen other states organized similar meetings.

The movement for women’s rights had other heroines besides Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. There was Lucy Stone, the first American woman to deliver a public lecture on women’s rights. When Lucy Stone married, she kept her own name.

There was Elizabeth Blackwell. She became the first woman graduate of a medical college.

Then there was Amelia Bloomer. She wore large, roomy trousers with a short skirt over them because they were more comfortable than the heavy dresses women were expected to wear.