At the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, N.Y., a woman’s rights
convention–the first ever held in the United States–convenes with almost
200 women in attendance. The convention was organized by Lucretia Mott
and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, two abolitionists who met at the 1840 World
Anti-Slavery Convention in London. As women, Mott and Stanton were
barred from the convention floor, and the common indignation that this
aroused in both of them was the impetus for their founding of the
women’s rights movement in the United States
