(Our eight-day, 400-mile Buffalo to Albany Cycle the Erie Bike Tour with Parks & Trails NY began in 9/11, 9/18 columns.)
Seneca Falls is the birthplace of the Women’s Rights movement and for the longest time, had been a sort of mecca in my mind. So, after a day of fairly challenging (though unbelievably scenic) biking, 53.7 miles over hills and dales of some of New York’s prettiest farmland (Amish Country, actually – who knew?) in pouring rain (frustrating because I couldn’t shoot photos), which miraculously clears as I come into our campground, the Myderse Academy (at the top of a hill), I rush to put up my tent, and hop aboard the shuttle bus arranged by Parks & Trails NY, the organizer of our eight day, 400-mile Cycle the Erie tour to get into the downtown.
They’ve arranged for far more, as I have already come to realize.
The Women’s Rights National Historical Park is normally closed on a Tuesday and never open at night (regular hours are Wed-Sun, 9-5). But the National Park Service rangers have come in especially for the 600 Cycle the Erie riders, and keep it open until 8 pm, as are other major sites in this quaint, small town that reminds you, not coincidentally, of Bedford Falls in that famous movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
The lobby of the Women’s Rights National Historical Park is graced with a virtually life-sized “First Wave” statue by Lloyd Lillie, commissioned by the NPS for the center’s opening in 1993. It depicts the early Women’s Rights activists in stunningly realistic pose: leading the group, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass; Martha Wright (who amazingly, is shown pregnant), Lucretia Mott and James Mott, Jane Hunt and Richard Hunt, also Mary Ann McClintock and her husband Thomas McClintock.
(Susan B Anthony, who was in Rochester, did not attend the convention and is all but unacknowledged here.)
I had no idea what to expect from the Women’s Rights National Historical Park, which is built around the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, the modest building where the famous first Women’s Rights Convention was held on July 19 and 20,1848. I am just in time for the tour (offered on the half-hour).
It’s a shrine, to be sure, but you have to use your imagination. The building is virtually vacant except for wooden pews, and otherwise this vaulting hollow space, the walls stripped down, the balcony removed during one of the building’s various incarnations.
The Women’s Movement actually grew out of the women’s involvement in the Abolition Movement, but it took on steam as a labor movement, with more and more women working out of their home and in factories. Wesleyan Church was a Methodist church in the 1840s but in 1843, the Methodist church split over abolition.
Most surprising of all was that the Women’s Movement was not about the right to vote – at least initially. But rather, an early advocate of Women’s rights, Frederick Douglass, spurred the five women organizers to incorporate a right to vote among their grievances.
Why did the Women’s Rights movement foment in Seneca Falls? The explanation offered is that the canals (Seneca-Cayuga), the turnpike and New York Central railroad brought men and so brought women. That’s the explanation! Not that the canals and transportation propelled the Industrial Revolution which created factories and new job opportunities for women, who gained a sense of independence and realized how they were subjugated, treated as chattel, under the tyranny of men?
Also, there were a number of Quakers in the area, who were progressives and ardent abolitionists. Four of the five women who organized the Seneca convention (McClintock, Hunt, Mott and Wright) were Quakers. And this branch of Quakers, the Hicksites also embraced women’s rights in the church.
In 1840, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the central leader of convention and the only one of the five women who was not Quaker, had just married Henry Brewster Stanton, a well known abolitionist who was nominated to be delegate to the Anti-slavery Convention that year in London, where they essentially had their honeymoon.
While at the convention in London, Elizabeth Candy Stanton met another important abolitionist, Lucretia Mott, a minister in the Quaker church (the Quaker Church afforded women considerable more equality than the rest of society). “She was not quiet. She was called ‘The Black Man’s goddess’.”
But the women’s attendance at the London convention caused a stir. The first day, the men did not even discuss abolition, but focused on what they should do with the women, who were not allowed to speak and were kept apart..
Stanton and Mott were so incensed and insulted, they decided to set up their own convention.
Years pass. In 1847, Stanton, now with children, moved from Boston, where she had the life of an affluent lady – servants, intellectual stimulation – to a house in Seneca Falls given to her by her father, Daniel Cady, because of her husband’s health.
She hated living in Seneca Falls, a backwater with no intellectual stimulation, no decent servants. (I later am told by Dan Ward, curator of the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, that the reason they did not have decent servants was because the mills employed most of the women and the ones who were not working in the mills likely had been dismissed as agitators). “She was a typical housewife and miserable.”
Stanton invited Mott from Philadelphia and they gathered at the Hunt house, one of wealthiest Quakers. McClintock, another wealthy Quaker, was also at this tea party.
As Butler relates it, the women moaned about how terrible the help was, but then began to sympathize with their plight: if a woman worked, her wages went to her husband or father, her inheritance went to her husband, there was no college for women, no opportunity to earn a professional license, If a woman was in an abusive marriage, she couldn’t divorce. If there was a divorce, she would not have custody of her children. Women had no vote, no say in the laws that governed them.
The women organized the convention and prepared a document laying out their grievances, the “Declaration of Sentiments,” which was modeled after the Declaration of Independence and mimicked its language in describing the tyranny under which women were forced to live.
Only women were admitted on the first day. “They didn’t want the disapproving glare of men. But when the Declaration was read, and the assembled heard ‘right to vote’ – suddenly there was a gasp. Some women said they needed the right to vote, others said no.” (Sounds like the back-and-forth over the Equal Rights amendment which continues today).
Men were allowed to attend on the second day. Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist leader, gave a powerful speech in urging the women to advance their petition for the vote: “Why should I bother [to win the vote] if half the intellect can’t. It should be the right of everyone to choose who makes the laws we are obliged to follow.”
Out of the 300 people who attended (the chapel had a balcony then), only 100 signed the Declaration of Sentiments, and of these, 68 were women and 32 were men). (Forty percent of those who attended were Quakers.)
Frederick Douglass took the Declaration to Rochester, where he printed it in North Star, his abolitionist newspaper. But the convention is widely ridiculed in newspapers (you can see clips in the exhibit).
“This is where the conversation started,” Ranger Butler says. “Women’s rights joins other reform movements. But it took another 72 years for women to get the vote with the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920.
“Everyone from the convention is dead by that time except for a girl from Waterloo who was 19 years old when she signed: Charlotte Woodard was 91 when the 19th amendment was ratified.”
Indeed, following the Civil War and Emancipation, black men won the right to vote with the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870. Women, who during the Civil War demonstrated their abilities to manage farms and businesses in their husband’s absence, who played key parts in nursing (Clara Barton) and setting up sanitation systems and supplying troops, expected they would get rights, too.
“The Civil War brought emancipation for slaves. Women expected the same equal rights after Civil War.” But that didn’t happen.
Butler notes that though women didn’t get the vote until 1920, certain reforms did happen along the way, through state laws. For example, in 1847, New York State law allowed women to inherit.
It is striking to me to learn that the notion of women’s suffrage was not fully embraced by women. Ranger Butler, who is normally at the Roosevelt site at Hyde Park, said that even Eleanor Roosevelt, initially at least, “wasn’t in favor of women’s suffrage – only as First Lady. She was an Edwardian woman, and not political.” Her life took her on an amazing turnabout.
The link between the women’s movement and abolition was strong – the homes of Hunt and McClintock, two leaders of the women’s movement homes, were used for the underground railroad. (More about NYS’s Underground Railroad at www.jimapro.com/eriecanalway/ugrr/)
The history of the Wesleyan Chapel can be a metaphor for the ambivalence of American society to women’s rights: From 1843-1871 it was chapel, then an opera house/performing arts hall; then a roller skating rink, a movie theater (in 1910s), then a Ford dealership, and ironically enough, finished its days as a laundromat before facing a wrecking ball.
“Women fought to save the building.” In 1982, during the Reagan Administration, it was turned into a national park.
There is a film in a lovely auditorium, “Dreams of Equality,” which dramatizes the early internal debate over breaking out of the constrained role women were relegated to, and brings it almost up to date (at least to the 1980s), with an attempt at “conversations” between girls and boys.
But in the film, one of the main characters loses her husband in the Civil War and one woman says to the other, “If a woman had a say in making laws, there would be no wars,” to which the other woman replies, “If we had a say, who would listen?”
And in another bit of dialogue, the woman wonders, “Don’t women also have rights?” to which her brother responds, “What men most prize in a woman is affection.”
While the film does an okay job of laying out the issues, it seems too narrow, too artificial, too strained and too dated, and much to my surprise and disappointment, so does the rest of the exhibit, which is small, narrow, more gimmick than substance.
There is little context for the emergence of the women’s movement – or even how women wound up being in such a constricted setting to begin with, when you consider that America was founded on a frontier mentality of individual freedom, that women had a role in the Revolutionary War, and then again, in the Civil War when they kept the farms and family businesses running.
While it does make some reference to the Industrial Revolution, it does not sufficiently connect the dots to the growing numbers of women employed out of home in factories, and how their conditions suffered.
What I do find is a display which shows the cultural and religious “pressures” to making women conform to narrow roles as housewives and mothers: “Advice books” that defined a woman’s role and provided guidelines for keeping house, caring for husband, raising children (just like in the 1950s, when were anxious to bring women back into home from the factories and liberation they had during World War II).
Meanwhile, religious traditions reinforced women’s inferior role; church authority was used to validate the subjugation of women. Religious teaching pronounced, “The man is the head and governor of the family” in God’s church.
(Here, too, I think how churches reinforced the “righteousness” of persecuting and ethnically cleansing Native Americans from their communities as a matter of divine right, and of enslaving blacks. The Quakers had a much more progressive view of women, who were allowed to become leaders in their church and it is not surprising that they championed both Abolition and Women’s Rights.)
“Woman were classified as (on par) with minors, lunatics and idiots. Women couldn’t own property, sign documents, and was “one husband away from poverty'”, the exhibit notes.
The reality for too many women was infant mortality (and no means to avoid having children), poverty, slavery, widowhood.
Overall, though, winning the vote was not the main theme, and it did not seem to me that it was explained how women’s suffrage became animated, who those leaders were, as if the story somehow breaks off because it goes outside Seneca Falls. Is this a national site for Women’s Rights or for Seneca Falls? I wonder.
So I find, much to my surprise, a tiny phrase which I guess is meant to create the context for the women’s movement gathering steam in the 1840s: it notes that in the 1830s, “Jacksonian democratic ideals” called for rights for the “common man.”
And then it hit me: The Constitution only provided the vote to “white men with property.” So how did the non-propertied “common man” get the right to vote? There wasn’t an amendment to the Constitution, such as the 15th Amendment which gave Black Men the right to vote in1870, or the 19th amendment that finally gave the right to vote to women in 1920 (and by the way, Native Americans only obtained their right to vote in 1970, which also did not require an amendment).
But this is absolutely glossed over. The story of Women’s Suffrage is incomplete in the Women’s Rights National Historical Park.
In fact, the notion that a key factor in inspiring the concept of women’s rights (and women’s suffrage) came from the connection to Native Americans (the Oneida, for example), living in the vicinity is almost entirely omitted except for the briefest allusion.
As I learned at “Gems Along the Mohawk,” at Herkimer, before I embarked on this Erie Canal bike tour, Matilda Joslyn Gage (mother-in-law to L. Frank Baum, author of “Wizard of Oz”) had connections to the Oneida women and incorporated their ideas of a woman’s right to property (in fact, Oneida women were responsible to hold the clan’s property) and child custody and that it was women’s role in selecting the chief at a time when “European” women had none of these rights. Gage shared these ideas with Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Gage made her first public speech at the third national Women’s Rights convention in Syracuse in 1852 and she became a leader of the women’s movement, but because she and Susan B. Anthony were not at Seneca Falls, they are not even mentioned here in Seneca Falls.)
[You can visit Matilda Joslyn Gage’s home, which interprets a rich five-dimensional segment of United States history: women’s rights, abolition, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) influence on democracy and women’s rights, the ongoing struggle to keep religion out of government and the utopian vision of peace and social justice presented in the Oz books, Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation, 210 East Genesee St., Fayetteville, NY 13066, (315) 637-9511, www.matildajoslyngage.org]
Equally glossed over is the fact that the Women’s Rights movement really started as a labor movement, and Seneca Falls, with its booming knitting mills that employed women out of their homes for wages, had more to do with the reason why the movement centered here than anything. In fact, the role of the Industrial Revolution and how it changed the economic and cultural landscape is not discussed at all.
Indeed, Dan Ward, the curator of the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse (where you can see a truly first-class exhibit that puts this exhibit to shame), said that when the museum opened in the Reagan era, that was the criticism even then. There is hardly any mention whatsoever of Workers Rights or anything to do with equality in the workplace or equal access to higher education or careers.
On the subject of education, there is a reference to how women were only provided education suited to their future role. “Women are intellectually inferior and should be educated for different purpose.” There is a small mention of the two colleges that were the first to provide women with higher education – Georgia Female College (giving BA) and Oberlin College, which opened to women in 1837 to pursue a college degree.
You would think there would be a lot more of the exhibit devoted to the renewed Women’s Rights Movement in the 1970s (indeed, what happened between the 1920s and 1970s that another Women’s Movement was necessary?), the struggle (and failure to win) the Equal Rights Amendment, or ongoing struggles (in the 1970s, a single woman could not get a mortgage for a house or a loan for a business without a husband to guarantee it), or the continuing struggle for women’s reproductive freedom and pay equity. (Indeed, the renewed Women’s Rights Movement again follows the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, but there is no connection made.) The most relevant item to today’s continued struggle is a copy of the Lilly Ledbetter Act, signed by President Obama, along with his autographed remarks, that was presented to the site when he visited – it is in a small glass case in the lobby.
Curators are always making choices about what to display and how to display it, and if the purpose of this museum is to highlight only Seneca Falls as a center of the women’s movement, it fails, and if it is to honor and foster understanding of the Women’s Movement, it is woefully incomplete and uninspiring. The key issues are treated as footnotes.
I left with more questions than answers, disappointment, and an emptiness.
What is missing in the exhibit is compensated for in outstanding materials like “Women’s Rights” pamphlet which I take away, giving excellent timelines. I learn for example that in 1910, Washington State “gives women full franchise, inspiring a nationwide campaign that soon brings success in several western states. The Progressive Party endorses women’s suffrage in 1912.”
(Women’s Rights National Historical Park, 136 Fall Street, Seneca Falls. NY 13148, 315.568.2991,www.nps.gov/wori)
Indeed, you learn more about the Women’s Movement from the women themselves in the National Women’s Hall of Fame, just a short walk away from the Women’s Rights National Historical Park.
That’s where I am headed, hurriedly, next.
The 18th Annual Cycle the Erie Canal ride is scheduled July 10-17, 2016. In the meantime, you can cycle the trail on your own – detailed information is at the ptny.org site, including suggested lodgings and attractions. For more information on Cycle the Erie Canal, contact Parks & Trails New York at 518-434-1583 or visit www.ptny.org.
Next: National Women’s Hall of Fame on the Move
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