Welcome to one of the few national parks dedicated to a social reform movement - Women's rights.Here in Seneca Falls and Waterloo, in living rooms and on front porches, in private and in public, a group of five women started a movement that would transform American society.
In 1848, those five women summoned reformers from across the northeast to the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls. For two days, as many as 300 women and men considered the role of women in a democratic society. They emerged with the Declaration of Sentiments n- a document that shaped a reform movement for decades to come. Indeed, it continues today.
Women's Rights National Park includes the Wesleyan Chapel and the homes of some of the movement's organizers - places where radical thought turned into enduring improvement for millions across the world.
With Lightning Speed
Though hundreds of miles from major east-coast cities, Seneca Falls' industrial prominence gave it easy access to the outside world. Railroads, the canal, and turnpikes carried flour, textiles and pumps from Seneca Falls throughout the nation.The organizers of the First Women's Rights Convention hoped those same networks would spread word of the convention and its reform ideas around the globe. They did. In 1851, the Earl of Carlyle introduced in the British House of Lords the very first resolution in favor of women's voting rights. but ideas proved easier than actual change. Achieving women's suffrage would take seven decades in America, eight in Great Britain.
... a revolution now cannot be confined to the place or people where it may commence, but flashes with lightning speed from heart to heart, from land to land, til it has traversed the globe...
Frederick Douglass, July 7, 1848
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