What was the Seneca Falls Convention?

0:05I don't want to downplay how hard that Suffragists worked to make the 19th Amendment possible. This was planned over very long periods of time back in 1848, there was a conference held in Seneca Falls, New York, and the purpose of the conference was to discuss women's rights and at the Seneca Falls Conference, and it's a very famous conference. For the first time you've had women talking about, hey, we need to get together and work in order to find votes for women. It was a new idea at the time, and not all the women agreed that this was the battle that should be fought. In fact, the two women who are most well-known and associated from the Senecal Falls Conference, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott, they disagreed. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton told Lucretia Mott,

0:58I'm going to propose that we have a resolution saying that women have a duty to work towards getting the vote. Lucretia Mott thought it was a bad idea, she said, you'll make us look ridiculous but Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, no I'm going to do this and they presented it as a resolution and it passed, but not by a huge margin and this was a conference that was all about women's rights. All the people who were there were there because they supported women's rights but they didn't think the vote was the thing to go for.

1:33Over time, it became clear that Elizabeth Cady Stanton was right, the key to protecting all rights is to secure the right to vote. Funny thing about politicians when you've got the right to vote, they start caring about what you want. I think Stanton has been proven to be correct over the years that that right to vote is crucial.