ning of women's
minds in 1848 when the world was startled once more by a revolution in
France which spread to Germany, Poland, Austria, Hungary, and Italy.
Once more the people of the earth began to explore the principles of
democracy and expound human rights. Women, now better educated and more
"advanced" in their ideas, played a role of still greater importance in
that revolution. They led in agitations and uprisings. They suffered
from reaction and persecution. From their prison in France, two of them
who had been jailed for too much insistence on women's rights exchanged
greetings with American women who were raising the same issue here. By
this time the women had more supporters among the men. Horace Greeley,
editor of the New York _Tribune_, though he afterwards recanted, used
his powerful pen in their behalf. Anti-slavery leaders welcomed their
aid and repaid them by urging the enfranchisement of women.

=The Woman's Rights Convention of 1848.=--The forces, moral and
intellectual, which had been stirring among women, crystallized a few
months after the outbreak of the European revolution in the first
Woman's Rights Convention in the history of America. It met at Seneca
Falls, New York, in 1848, on the call of Lucretia Mott, Martha Wright,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Mary Ann McClintock, three of them Quakers.
Accustomed to take part in church meetings with men, the Quakers
naturally suggested that men as well as women be invited to attend the
convention. Indeed, a man presided over the conference, for that
position seemed too presumptuous even for such stout advocates of
woman's rights.

The deliberations of the Seneca Falls convention resulted in a
Declaration of Rights modeled after the Declaration of Independence. For
example, the preamble began: "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 occupied...." So also it closed: "Such has been the patient
suffering of women under this government and such is now the necessity
which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are
entitled." Then followed the list of grievances, the same number which
had been exhibited to George III in 1776. Especially did they assail the
disabilities imposed upon them by the English common law imported into
America--the law which denied married women their property, their wages