Re-Rooting American Women's Activism

Global Perspectives on 1848

Abstract

The Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention of 1848 is considered the birthplace of women's rights in the United States. Historians of women's rights, including both pioneer feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and modern scholars like Eleanor Flexner and Ellen DuBois, have highlighted the links between the demand for woman suffrage made at Seneca Falls and the achievement of women 's rights to vote by constitutional amendment seventy-two years later. Rarely, however, has the birth of the women 's rights movement been linked to such contemporaneous events as the revolutionary upheavals in Europe, the Mexican-American war, theabolition ofslavery in the French West Indies, the massive immigration ofthe Irish, Germans, and Chinese to the U.S., or transformations in Native American societies. This article explores precisely these connections and argues that contextualizing the warnen's rights movement in this way offers a more accurate reading of nineteenth-century developments for historians and a more multifaceted legacy for modern-day feminists.