July 17, 2023: Seneca Falls Studying: Quaker Communities

[July19-20 marks the 175thanniversary of the SenecaFalls Women’s Rights Convention. Although, as I argued in thisweeklong series, our focus on Seneca Falls has overshadowed other importantearly conventions, it’s still a milestone moment, and this week I’llAmericanStudy a handful of contexts. Leading up to a weekend post on our 21stcentury movement!]

On both a delightfullyspecific and an important broad layer to the Convention’s origins.

As Iimagine is the case with many significant historical moments and events, theSeneca Falls Convention came about quite haphazardly. A large number of Quakers(members of the Religious Society of Friends, formally) had made New York’s SenecaCounty (and specifically the county capital of Waterloo) their home overthe preceding half-century, including influential Quaker families (andabolitionists) like Thomasand Mary Ann M’Clintock and Richardand Jane Hunt. Perhaps no American Quaker was more famous in that era than LucretiaCoffin Mott, the abolitionist and activist who had gained a reputation asone of the nation’s most fiery and eloquent orators. Mott’s sister MarthaCoffin Wright lived in nearby Auburn, New York, and in the summer of 1848Mott and herhusband James traveled to the area to visit with her sister and also tocontinue their activist work on a number of local levels: with the region’s sizeablecommunity of formerly enslaved people; at the Auburn StatePenitentiary where Mott lectured; and on the nearby Seneca CattaraugusReservation.

On Sunday,July 9th, Mott attended a local Quaker worship and then joined agroup of these women from the area—her sister Martha, Jane Hunt, Mary Ann M’Clintock,and her fellow activist (and the group’s only non-Quaker) ElizabethCady Stanton for tea at the Hunt home. The conversation apparently and unsurprisinglyturned to the frustrating and unnecessary challenges that faced these women aswomen, both in their activist work and in every other arena of their lives inmid-century American society. They decided to take advantage of Mott’s visit andprominence and to host a women’s rights convention, creating on the spot anannouncement that began “WOMAN’S RIGHTS CONVENTION—A Convention to discuss thesocial, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman” and that ran in the Seneca County Courier beginning onJuly 11th. Other regional and national periodicals like FrederickDouglass’ North Star picked up the advertisement as well,and despite the short notice the word spread and a fair number of attendeesmade it to Seneca Falls and its newly constructed WesleyanMethodist Chapel for the July 19-20 Convention.

I reallylove how informal and intimate that origin point was, and again I think it hasa lot to tell us about how history is very often made and shaped (too often by informalgatherings of the powerful and privileged, of course, whether in smoke-filledrooms or otherwise; but in this case something quite different and far moreinclusive). But it’s also far from coincidental that this was a gathering ofQuakers, held at a prominent Quaker family’s home after a Quaker worshipservice. Other than briefly inthis post on one of my very favorite American writers and voices, JohnWoolman, I don’t think I’ve engaged nearly enough in this space with theoversized (given the community’s numbers) and inspiringrole that Quakers have played in American activist and social movements andprogress. That certainly included both theabolitionist and the earlywomen’s rights movements, the combination of which truly definedconventions like Seneca Falls. I’m not sure any historical detail bettercaptures that foundational presence and influence than an afternoon tea atwhich a group of determined Quaker women launched a national movement!

NextSeneca context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?