Seneca Falls :: essays research papers

Title The road from SENECA FALLS. (cover story)Source New Republic, 08/10/98, Vol. 219 field 6, p26, 12p, 3bwAuthor(s) Stansell, ChristineAbstract Reviews several books re slowd to womens suffrage and feminism. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady STANTON and Susan B. Anthony, hoi polloi One In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840-1866, edited by Ann D. Gordon Harriet STANTON Blatch and the Winning of charr Suffrage, by Ellen Carol DuBois Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820-1920, by Suzanne M. Marilley More.AN 888132ISSN 0028-6583Full Text Word Count 9663Database academic Search PremierSection BOOKS & THE ARTS The feminism of the mothers, the feminism of the daughters, the feminism of the girls. THE ROAD FROM SENECA FALLSI.One hundred and fifty years past this summer, in the little country town of SENECA FALLS in upstate New York, several dozen excited women and a few kindle men held the first meeting in the world devoted wholly to women s rights. It was 1848, the springtime of the peoples in Europe and, although these Americans were utmost removed from the emancipatory proclamations in Europe, they caught the fever and produced one of their own, the resolving of Sentiments We hold these truths to be self-evident that all told men and women are created equal. Compared to the apocalypticism of The Communist Manifesto, another product of that year, the SENECA FALLS Declaration seems modest, a relic of right-thinking republicanism rather than a portent of wrenching extremist transformation. Yet its effects were destined to be no less profound, and far more benign. The gathering in 1848 emerged from a long, fitfully articulated register of womens grievances, though the participants were not aware of it. The interruption of historical recollection and, in its absence, the strains of improvising a politics of grievance on the spot, have unceasingly characterized this tradition. The written record of female protest extends back to the late middle(a) ages, to the French woman of letters Christine de Pizan and her Book of the City of Ladies. It was in the late eighteenth century, however, that the language of the rights of man gained momentum around the northern Atlantic world, shifting the idea of justice for women out of the register of utopia to make it, for a few highly politicized women in the age of revolution, a plausible coating in the here and now. Thus, in 1776, Abigail Adams admonished her patriot husband, away in Philadelphia at the Continental Congress, to remember the ladies in their declarations, a nudge tempered by coyness but at heart quite serious.