Declaration Revisited: The Declaration of Sentiments

Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world." "One of the things that I like about the Declaration of Independence, though the more we visit it, the more problematic things we find in it, but one thing I can say I like about it is its directness." "Yeah, it does a lot in only 1300 words." "It's an argument. It's a solid argument in four parts." "First, a preamble saying what the document is, then a statement of human rights, and the claim that when a government doesn't give you those rights, it's your job to alter or abolish it, and then we got the grievances, and finally, the action because of the above, we're ending this relationship. And throughout this series, we have talked about the immediate criticism and accusations of hypocrisy in it. And yet, it lives on. It lives on as this core of our American identity. So what if you didn't just criticize it or call it a task? What if you used its power of argument as a tool to fight inequality?" "Right, in 1848 in America, probably every school child was forced to memorize this document. Everyone knew the words, they all knew the rhythm, the cadence, it would have been a deeply familiar text to them." "I'm Nick Capady-Jay." "I'm Hannah McCarthy." "And this is Civics 101. Today is our third and final revisit to the Declaration of Independence, and we're exploring the Declaration of Sentiments, the document at the heart of the women's rights movement. And we spoke with Laura Frey, she's a professor at Hobart and Williams Myth Colleges, and she's also the host of amended a new, wonderful podcast about the myths and realities of the long fight for women's suffrage." "So we should start with what the Declaration of Sentiments actually is." "Yeah, so the Declaration of Sentiments is essentially the central manifesto of the early women's rights movement. It was a text that was created by a group of women, one of whom was Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Sack of Falls in 1848 in upstate New York." "Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an activist and one of the first leaders of the women's rights movement. She helped organize the Seneca Falls Convention and wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, which was an extremely influential document at the time. A Judith Welman, she's a historian of the Convention at Seneca Falls. She called it the single most important factor in spreading news of the women's rights movement around the country." Quick side note. When Laura was referencing the Declaration of Sentiments in the interview, she was reading from this massive reproduction of it. "I have this in front of me and you're going to laugh because this was a gift to me from a student, and for Halloween when my kid was seven maybe, she wanted to be Elizabeth Cady Stanton. So she wore a witch hat and the Declaration of Sentiments around her neck." "That's adorable. Of course, if you're the daughter of Laura Frey, that's how you go for Halloween." But why 1848? And what makes them think that this is the way to go? "Well, starting in the early 1800s, a small number of women began to group up and push back against societal restrictions against them. And in 1840, Stanton goes to London for an anti-slavery convention, and on the boat ride back, she befriends abolitionist, activist, and quaker, Lucretia Coffin-Mott. And the two of them on the boat start to plan their own convention, one to further the cause of women's rights. And in 1848, Mott and others put an announcement in the Seneca County Courier calling a convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious conditions and rights of women." And so that goes out just to sort of the locals. And so they sit around and they start talking and they're like, "Well, what are we going to do with this meeting? We've never had a women's rights meeting before. Maybe we should have something that people should talk about and maybe even vote on. Stanton herself claims credit for this, but it's not clear that she's the one who came up with the idea." But someone said, "You know, what if we use the Declaration of Independence as a model? What if that was our guide?" And I'm sure everyone went, "Oh, yeah." So Stanton does do a lot of the work of writing this. And so she takes the original Declaration. She goes home and she says, "Okay, let's fix this." Right? Let's fix this for women. And, you know, of course, the best line is the first one of the second paragraph where she says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal." Right? Like, that right there would have signaled to everyone who saw it, who listened to it, who heard it, read out loud, "Whoa, wait, something's different. Something's different here." And perhaps, you know, at that point, a lot of people would have accepted the term men to mean all humans without thinking about it, right? It was, it was often a term used to mean people, generally. But the fact that she put in women there was a wake-up call in some ways for the people listening. The original Declaration says all men are created equal. And as we've said in several episodes, women, people of color, enslaved Americans, Native Americans, and white non-landowners were not included. The Declaration of Sentiments is even shorter than the Declaration of Independence. It's under a thousand words, but it uses that same powerful four-part argument. And the other thing that Stanton does in the Declaration of Sentiments that really parallels well to the original is, you know, the whole Declaration is in some ways a wake-up letter to the king, right? Like, "Yo, king, here's what you've done." And Stanton takes that format and she applies it to men and women, so she's like, "Yo, men, here's what you've done that have made all of the women in America unequal." She's, you know, calling them out here. And it's an exhaustive list. It's got 16 grievances against, quote, "He," the first of which is, "He has not ever permitted her to exercise her an alienable right to the elective franchise." "He has never permitted her to vote." And that one, that's the first one, it was the most controversial at the time. Oh, Stanton read them this draft version of the Declaration of Sentiments, and Lucretia Mott says to her, in her, in her lovely Quaker 19th-century language, she says, "Lizzy, V will make us ridiculous." That the right to vote, the demand for the right to vote was so radical, it's going to be problematic. Now, there's some issues with that. There are lots of people, prior to this moment, who had been asking for the right to vote, right? Women voted in New Jersey until 1807. There were women in colonial Massachusetts that we know who voted. So, you know, it's not completely unheard of, but it was fairly radical. And so, when the meeting takes place, everyone, all of these ideas are raised, and people are like, "Yeah, yeah, sure, sure." And then they get to voting rights, and the convention, you can kind of imagine, maybe, like, took kind of a deep breath, like, "Okay, what are we going to do with this one?" And, and Stanton, herself, it was her first time speaking in public, and she professed to being very nervous and felt like she didn't do a good job defending, defending this provision. And so, she turns to Frederick Douglass. Douglass, who escaped slavery just 10 years earlier, became one of the most influential abolitionists in American history. He gave speeches around the world advocating for equality and ending slavery, and he attended the convention in Seneca Falls. He says something along the lines of, "Without the ballot, none of these other changes are going to be possible because women have to have sufficient power to make these other things stick, essentially, and that the vote is the way to do that." I find it really interesting that the question of getting women the right to vote was the most controversial, because there are some grievances in there that are quite advanced for the time. Yeah, the Declaration asks for equal pay for equal work for women, right? You know, something that still is not achieved in America today. I mean, equal pay. Women only earned the right to sue their employers for unequal pay in 2010. Yeah, and another grievance stand to accuse his men of playing God. You know, the language used, she says, "You served the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action when that belongs to her conscience and her God." So basically, she's saying men put themselves above God by trying to tell women what they can and can't do. And so, in some ways, she's using religion to indict men further for their bad behavior. So it's not just that men tell women what to do. Men are trying to take over and become God. And so that, I think, gives it a degree of power for her listeners, or her listeners, her readers, or whoever would see this. They would, they maybe would resonate with that and say, "Wow, nobody should get in between somebody and God." That's so interesting, because that's kind of the best bit of the Magna Carta, right? That no one is above God or the [BLANK_AUDIO] Law, not even the rulers, not even kings. All right, give me just one more grievance. - Oh, you got it, here's one. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction, which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or the law, she is not known. - Women couldn't become doctors or lawyers? - No, they weren't permitted to attend medical school or law school. The first woman lawyer, Arabela Mansfield, was admitted to the Iowa bar in 1860. - Have any of you out there ever Googled your own name, like actually done it, you'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage. Maybe that one's just me, but here's the thing. There are companies called Data Brokers, whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers, sometimes to people running scams. And once your data's out there, it just keeps circulating. That is where Incogni comes in. Incogni contacts Data Brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over, so your info doesn't just pop right back up. You set it up once, and they keep working in the background. You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to www.incogni.com/sivics or use the code civics@checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you. Ignore it. Geez. All right, so there is one grievance. I do think that we need to address. The third one, an accusation that I know that Laura and other scholars have explored in their work. This one says, "He has withheld her from rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men, both natives and foreigners." Yeah. Yeah. That's the one that's a signal to me that the women's rights movement is not going to take up the cause of equality for all people. It's going to argue. And Stanton herself is the flag bearer for this aspect of the movement, but it's going to argue essentially that white women should have the same rights as white men, not necessarily that all people should all be equal. Stanton is particularly unhappy at this point and she becomes increasingly so over the next 20 years that there are men that she believes to be her own personal inferior, who have more power and more rights in American society than she does. And that's her signal there about who she feels that she's better than. And by the 1860s, this becomes fully blown racist language and arguments. And she's letting her baggage show here in a way, right? That she considers herself better than other people. And she's going to put that right front and center of the women's rights movement. And nobody really calls her on that bit. They vote on all of the provisions of the declaration. And no one says, hey, at least we don't have record of anyone saying in the meeting, hey, maybe that's not the nicest thing you could be saying here when we're in a movement at a meeting for people who are looking for equality. Let's not also retrench race and class inequalities in our movement. Yeah, we don't see that. This is something that we cannot separate from the movement and Stanton specifically, that these women divorce women's suffrage from other issues of equality. It's the ugly truth that the best known suffragists actively opposed the 15th Amendment, which gave black American men the right to vote. Yeah. This document mimics the Declaration of Independence and its words and its format. But there's one contrast that I wanted to ask Laura about. It's the action, the conclusion. The action in 1776 was, and therefore, because of this, we're done with you, England. We're done with the he and all of those grievances. This isn't the case with the Declaration of Sentiments. 68 women signed it, but so did 32 men. Most of the people-- these are married people. These are people who live in close relationship with each other. There are men present at the convention. They don't want to get rid of men in the same way that Americans wanted to get rid of the king. They just want men to behave better. They want the laws to be framed more equally. They want to seat at the table, essentially. And so in some ways, they're not saying goodbye. They're asking to say hello. As we've revisited the Declaration of Independence and all of these episodes, one theme that struck me again and again was that the Declaration has unending reverberations. It's got bad echoes in the case of the anti-Native American language that made its way into Supreme Court decisions and good ones. It's used to incite change to advocate for equality. Yeah, I asked Laura, what the Declaration of Sentiments can teach us? I think what I would point to isn't anything inherent in the Declaration or in the movement or in the women's rights movement in self, but is just the persistence, right? This is 1848 when the Declaration of Sentiments is raised. It's not until 1920 that the 19th Amendment has passed that denies states the right to discriminate on the basis of sex. But it's not even until the present moment that all women have the right to vote in a secure way. So it takes a really long time to make change in America. It's so exciting right now to be living through this moment of profound, hopefully transformation. But I think it's going to be a marathon and not a sprint. And perhaps the women who met in 1848 knew that. Perhaps they did not. I don't know if they understood how long it was going to be before women's equality would be granted that it's still not even right at this moment. But nevertheless, they persisted. And I think that's the message that I try to carry is just to keep persisting. [MUSIC PLAYING] Well, that is a wrap, folks, on the Declaration of Sentiments, as well as our whole series on revisiting the Declaration. A new civic episode will be out soon. Today's episode is produced by me and Kepadice with you, Hannah McCarthy, and help from Jackie Fulton. Your hygienic is our executive producer and wears the Declaration of Sentiments around her neck, even when it's not Halloween. Music in this episode by Maiden, the Grand Affair, Azura, and that new twist on an old classic, Chris Sibrisky. Every two weeks, Nick and I pour through the lesser-known ephemera related to our episodes, the interesting trivia that gets cut from them. And we write about it in extra credit, our bi-weekly newsletter. It's free, it's fun, and we just want you to read it. If you're interested, check it out at our website, civics101podcast.org. There's a big old button you can click on right there. Civics101 is supported in part with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and is a production of NHPR in Hampshire Public Radio. [MUSIC PLAYING] Did you know that if your spouse goes missing, and you don't tell anyone, that's not necessarily a crime. That surprising fact is at the heart of the brand new season of Bearbrook, the critically acclaimed true crime podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio. I'm your host, Jason Moon. In this season, Bearbrook investigates another New Hampshire mystery, a Christmas tree farmer with dementia, vanishes. His wife never reports him missing. Can he still be found? Don't miss it. Follow Bearbrook wherever you get your podcasts.