Once Upon a Pedestal by Emily Hahn

Once Upon a Pedestal by Emily Hahn

Author:Emily Hahn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1973-12-31T16:00:00+00:00


Though the country air of New York was good for Henry Stanton, his wife found it difficult to adjust to this almost rural small-town existence, where servants were hard to get and harder to train. She had always lived in a city, with plenty of help. Now she found herself becoming a household drudge, and she resented it. Inevitably her thoughts returned to the resentments of an earlier date, and she reflected that woman’s lot was generally unenviable. How could she make it less so? There seemed no way out.

“My only thought,” she later wrote in her memoirs, Eighty Years and More, “was a public meeting for protest and discussion.”

So it was doubly exciting after a year or two to hear from Lucretia Mott, whom she had not seen since London. Mrs. Mott sent a message that she was visiting friends not far off, in a town called Waterloo, and she asked Mrs. Stanton to come over and spend the day. Elizabeth hastened to do so, and there met not only her old friend but a number of other intelligent Quaker women, who listened sympathetically when she poured out—as she put it—the torrents of her long-accumulating discontent, with vehemence and indignation. They caught her mood, and on the spot it was decided to call that long- postponed Women’s Rights Convention that she and Lucretia had once planned.

“We wrote the call that evening,” she recalled, “and published it in the County Courier the next day, the fourteenth of July, 1848.” The “call” was worded crisply, saying only, “The first Women’s Rights Convention to discuss the social, civil and religious conditions and rights of women will be held in the Wesleyan chapel at Seneca Falls on Wednesday and Thursday current, commencing at ten a.m. During the first day, the meeting will be exclusively for women, who are earnestly invited to attend. The public generally are invited to be present on the second day when Lucretia Mott will address the Convention.”

With only five days to go, the pioneers had to work fast. How did one go about preparing for a convention? There should be some sort of introduction, striking enough to start the thing off with a swing. Mrs. Stanton suggested that they model a statement on the Declaration of Independence, and the others agreed. On The Day, July 19, when the women assembled at the chapel it was found that a joker had bolted the door on the inside, but someone climbed through a window, opened it, and everyone entered, including a few inquisitive men who were not, by the terms of the announcement, invited. The delegates, after conferring a little, decided that the men might stay— which must have reminded at least two of them, Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Stanton, of the London meeting of 1840 when the women were definitely disinvited. Then, since the rule had been broken anyway, they felt free to ask James Mott to take the chair, an odd enough gesture, one might think, from women determined



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