- Hi, I'm ranger Nicole,
welcome to Seneca Falls
here at Women's Rights
National Historical Park.
We're here to talk about
the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel today,
right here in downtown.
And the Wesleyan chapel is where
the 1848 Women's Rights
Convention was held
and what was happening
in town at that time?
well it was a growing town
with a canal making businesses boom,
there was a lot of different
changes going on around,
different reforms.
People were interested in
things like anti-slavery,
town prints.
They were trying to work
through religious reforms
and throughout all these changes,
women were trying to find
their place in it, their role,
what could women do?
What were they allowed to do?
And so these discussions
were happening throughout
the decades before the 1848 convention.
And in 1848, a group of local women
and their friends gathered
to take a further step
and have their own convention
to talk about women
and women's issues, their civil, social,
and religious rights.
And that was the first time that
that happened publicly
in the United States.
And so, now we will talk more about
the convention and the chapel.
Here we are today in the Wesleyan Chapel,
this is where 300 people
gathered over two days
in 1848 in July, much like we are today
and in doing so, they served
a dialogue about women.
And in 1843, when this chapel was built,
the reformers called this
place kind of a hub for reform.
And so a lot of people
involved in the convention
that you would know the people
that came to this chapel.
And so it was a natural choice
for a group of organizers in
1848 to pick this building,
it was one of the only
buildings available to reformers
that could hold such a big group.
And so our organizers, mostly
five women from the local area
and their families, Lucretia Mott,
she was visiting from Philadelphia.
She was a Quaker anti-slavery reformer.
And there is Mary Anne M'Clintock
who was from Philadelphia
originally came up to Waterloo
and she was an organizer
of lots of different things
like antislavery fairs.
There was Jane Hunt who
hosted this gathering
over on July 9th in Waterloo,
getting all of her friends together.
It was Martha coffin Wright
who lived over in Aurburn
Lucretia's younger sister
but she spoke her own mind
and she made quite a storm over in Auburn.
They called her a very dangerous
woman because she spoke out
and was participating in
underground railroad activities.
There was also Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
who was a newcomer to town.
And she ended up kind of
instigating this whole convention.
In a way she recognized that this group
of like minded people could
really make a difference.
So whether you were talking
about just having tea,
it ended up being a planning meeting.
And so they arranged this
whole convention in 10 days,
not much time at all.
And they ended up inviting
them alots of their friends,
they invited Frederick Douglas
who owned a newspaper
in Rochester at the time
they all gathered here in the
chapel on July 19th and 20th.
Like I said 300 people
showed up over two days.
They hadn't really known
how many to expect.
And beforehand the M'Clintock family
and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had sat down
and put together a document
to present at this convention.
They called it "The
Declaration of Sentiments."
And it was important because it delineated
the right that they wanted for women.
At the time, women couldn't own property
if they were married,
they didn't have custody
of their children.
If you were a single woman,
you still had to pay taxes,
even if you weren't
represented in your government.
So they had a lot of qualms
about the laws in their time.
And so over the two days they discussed
"The Declaration of Sentiments",
see if they wanted to
add or change anything.
Most of it was pretty
unanimously agreed upon.
The item that caused the
most stirring controversy
was actually the right to vote for women.
One that we think of the most today
and Elizabeth Cady Stanton introduced
the right to vote for women.
Frederick Douglas also gave
a speech backing her up,
and a lot of people were hesitant.
At this time, it was just
kind of beyond thinking
that women would be given
the political right to vote.
At a time when they were
struggling to be recognized
as fully capable adult human beings.
And so this caused a big debate,
but they did end up putting it in there.
And their argument was that
if you have the right to vote,
you can protect all these other rights
that you want to achieve.
So they put that into the final document
and it spread through newspapers.
After the convention was over,
there was Fall convention of Rochester.
And after that, the movement changed
and grew over the decades.
And after that, this
chapel changed as well.
It had the Wesley Methodist for a time,
and then they moved to a different chapel
and that it was used for
many different things
like an upper house and a movie theater,
roller skating rink, a car mechanic shop.
It's last form was an apartment
building and a laundromat.
And there's still people in town
who remember living in the chapel.
It really wasn't that
long ago, in the 1970s.
And in the 70s, there was a push
to preserve historic buildings
like the Wesleyan Chapel that
tell the stories of people
interested in equality and women's rights.
So there was a big movement locally,
as well as nationally to start talking
about these women's
stories of women's history.
And so there was enough
support that the Women's Rights
National Historical Park
was established in 1980,
and then they acquired
different properties
like the Wesleyan Chapel
and now the park service has the chapel.
It will preserve and protect
it for future generations
to come and hear these stories
and have their own experiences here.
It's also our Centennial of the year
of 19th Amendment being passed.
And that was kind of the next
big milestone even though
it didn't end all of
the struggles for women,
especially women like
native American women
and Chinese American women
who weren't considered
citizens yet in 1920.
And it also didn't prevent there
from being things like poll taxes
and literacy tests in the South,
especially that prohibited a lot of women
of color from voting especially
African Americans down in the South.
Threats of violence as well.
So it wasn't the be all,
end all that 19th amendment,
but it was a giant step
forward and saying that
the right to vote could not
be prohibited based on gender.
So it was a giant step forward
and we are commemorating that 100 years,
this year in 2020, with events throughout
and in this special convention days.
And so I'd like to
thank you for joining us
today in that commemoration.
