The correct answer to this open question is the following.
Write a paragraph explaining why women should have the right to vote.
"Man and women are created equal. And the job of a man is no different from the job of a woman raising children in the home and taking care of his man. Different activities, same difficulty. We as women have the same intelligence, virtue, commitment, and tenacity that men. We deserve the right to express ourselves through suffrage. Every man was given life through a mother. So we know how to do things right."
What did women do to win equal rights?
For women such as Lucretia Mott, causes such as abolition and women's rights were linked. Like many other women
reformers, Mott was a Quaker. Quaker women enjoyed an unusual degree of equality in their communities. Mott was actively
involved in helping runaway enslaved workers. She organized the Philadelphia Female AntiSlavery Society. At an
antislavery convention in London, Mott met Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The two found they also shared an interest in women's
rights.
The Seneca Falls Convention
In July 1848, Stanton and Mott helped organize the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. About 300
people, including 40 men, attended.
A highlight of the convention was debate over a Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions. These resolutions called for an
end to laws that discriminated against women. They also demanded that women be allowed to enter the allmale world of
trades, professions, and businesses. The most controversial issue, however, was the call for woman suffrage, or the right to
vote in elections.
Elizabeth Stanton insisted the resolutions include a demand for woman suffrage. Some delegates worried that the idea was
too radical. Mott told her friend, "Lizzie, thee will make us ridiculous." Standing with Stanton, Frederick Douglass argued
powerfully for women's right to vote. After a heated debate, the convention voted to include in their declaration the demand
for woman suffrage in the United States.
The Seneca Falls Declaration
The first women's rights convention called for women's equality and for their right to vote, to speak publicly, and to run for
office. The convention issued a Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions modeled on the Declaration of Independence.
Just as Thomas Jefferson had in 1776, women are announcing the need for revolutionary change based on a claim of basic
rights:
"When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the
people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto [before] occupied, but one to which the laws of
nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the
causes that impel them to such a course."
In this passage, two important words—and women—are added to Thomas Jefferson's famous phrase:
"We hold these truths to be selfevident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. . . ."
The women's declaration called for an end to laws that discriminated against women. It demanded that women be free to
enter the allmale world of trades, professions, and businesses.
"The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and [wrongful takings of power] on the part of man toward woman,
having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid
world. . . .
Now, in view of this entire [withholding of rights] of onehalf the people of this country, their social and religious degradation,
—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and
fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges
which belong to them as citizens of the United States."
—Seneca Falls Convention Declaration of Sentiments
The Women's Movement Grows
The Seneca Falls Convention helped launch a wider movement. In the years to come, reformers held several nationa
After the Civil War, freed slaves did not receive equal citizenship. This was due to the fact that racism was still rampant within the United States. Essentially, freed slaves became very lowpaid workers on plantations.
