Women's Rights National Historical Park ⓘ

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, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course. We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves, by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation, - in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States. In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country. Firmly relying upon the final triumph of the Right and the True, we do this day affix our signatures to this declaration. Lucretia Mott Harriet Cady Eaton Margaret Pryor Elizabeth Cady Stanton Eunice Newton Foote Mary Ann M'Clintock Margaret Schooley Martha C. Wright Jane C. Hunt Amy Post Catherine F. Stebbins Mary Ann Frink Lydia Mount Delia Matthews Catharine C. Paine Elizabeth W. M'Clintock Malvina Seymour Phebe Mosher Catherine Shaw Deborah Scott Sarah Hallowell Mary M'Clintock Mary Gilbert Sophrone Taylor Cynthia Davis Hannah Plant Lucy Jones Sarah Whitney Mary H. Hallowell Elizabeth Conklin Sally Pitcher Mary Conklin Susan Quinn Mary S. Mirror Phebe King Julia Ann Drake Charlotte Woodward Martha Underhill Dorothy Matthews Eunice Barker Sarah R. Woods Lydia Gild Sarah Hoffman Elizabeth Leslie Martha Ridley Rachel D. Bonnel Betsey Tewksbury Rhoda Palmer Margaret Jenkins Cynthia Fuller Mary Martin P.A. Culvert Susan R. Doty Rebecca Race Sarah A. Mosher Mary E. Vail Lucy Spalding Lavinia Latham Sarah Smith Eliza Martin Maria E. Wilbur Elizabeth D. Smith Caroline Barker Ann Porter Experience Gibbs Antoinette E. Segur Hannah J. Latham Sarah Sisson The following are the names of the gentlemen present in favor of the movement: Richard P. Hunt Samuel D. Tillman Justin Williams Elisha Foote Frederick Douglass Henry W. Seymour Henry Seymour David Salding William G. Barker Elias J. Doty John Jones William S. Dell James Mott William Burroughs Robert Smalldridge Jacob Matthews Charles L. Hoskins Thomas M'Clintock Saron Phillips Jacob Chamberlain Jonathan Metcalf Nathan J. Milliken S.E. Woodworth Edward F. Underhill George W. Pryor Joel Bunker Isaac Van Tassel Thomas Dell E.W. Capron Stephen Shear Henry Hatley Azaliah Schooley

The Story of Women's Rights The First Women's Rights Convention held in 1848 marked the formal beginning of the women's rights movement. At the time of the convention, women were not allowed the freedoms assigned to men in the eyes of the law, the church, or the government. Women did not vote, hold elective office, attend college, or earn a living. If married, they could not make legal contracts, divorce an abusive husband, or gain custody of their children. Five women organized the First Women's Rights Convention - Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Martha Wright, Mary Ann M'Clintock, and Jane Hunt. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton , a Seneca Falls housewife and mother of three sons, sat down with the Quaker and abolitionist women, and decided that these wrongs should be made into rights. They called for a Convention, open to the public, to be held in Seneca Falls at the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel , July 19th and 20th, 1848. There they presented a Declaration of Sentiments , based on the language and content of the Declaration of Independence. Stating that "all men and women are created equal," they demanded equal rights for women, including - a radical idea - the right to vote. An estimate 300 people attended the Convention; the document was ratified and was signed by 68 women and 32 men . The First Women's Rights Convention and the Declaration of Sentiments have earned the Village of Seneca Falls a large place in the hearts of people all over the world. There is no major part of our lives today which has not been affected by this revolutionary document.

Women's Rights National Historical Park collects and houses items that support the preservation and interpretation of sites in Seneca Falls and Waterloo, New York associated with the 1848 First Women's Rights Convention. The primary focus of collecting is to document the lives and activities of the planners of the 1848 First Women's Rights Convention and the people who signed the Declaration of Sentiments issued from that convention. The bulk of the collection is made up of three kinds of artifacts. 1. Artifacts recovered during archeological investigations of park sites. ( Wesleyan Chapel , Elizabeth Cady Stanton House , M'Clintock House , and Hunt House ) 2. Things created or used by families that planned the 1848 First Women's Rights Convention which were purchased, donated, or on loan from family members or other institutions. 3. Architectural samples selectively removed from historic structures while researching their historical appearance. The park also cares for items reproduced from family collections or other institutions for exhibit in our historic houses.

Please contact us by telephone at 315-568-00245 for more information or to discuss possible additions to the collections. To view the collection online go to https://museum.nps.gov , and select this park or see the slide show below.

The statues in the lobby of the Visitor Center represent the "first wave" of women’s rights activists in the United States: more than 300 women and men organized and participated in the first Women’s Rights Convention. The sculpture includes statues of nine named people: Mary Ann and Thomas M’Clintock, Lucretia and James Mott, Jane and Richard Hunt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Martha Wright, and eleven “anonymous” participants who represent the men and women who attended the Convention but did not sign the Declaration of Sentiments.

Lloyd Lillie, Professor Emeritus, Boston University, and his assistants Victoria Guerina and Hilary Hutchinson sculpted the statues out of clay. Photographs and live models were used to create the movement, facial expressions, and size of the statues. In a foundry owned and operated by a woman, the figures were cast in bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. The weight process caused the statues to lose five percent of their size. The sculpture was commissioned by the National Park Service for Women’s Rights National Historical Park Visitor Center, which opened in August, 1993.

The term "first wave" comes from the idea that there have been multiple "waves" of the women's rights movement in America and throughout the world. The term came about in the late 1960's as a contrast to the term "second-wave feminism," which dominated the 1960's through early 1990's, and emphasized women's personal freedoms and social (rather than civil) inequalities. The time period of the First Wave is more loosely defined, encompassing most of the 19th Century through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The timelines that define these movements are created in hindsight; historians and scholars continue to debate what years begin and end each period. Though some may argue the Second Wave never ended, others propose that there are four distinct waves, with the fourth being current. When you visit Women's Rights National Historical Park, you may notice that the ways in which some exhibits discuss certain topics may sound outdated. As the study of the women's rights movement evolves, so do the ways we talk about it. When the visitor center was dedicated in 1993, the dominant women's rights movement at the time was the Second Wave. Therefore, many exhibits discuss the lives and accomplishments of women in the 20th Century. Today, however, we recognize that our primary area of focus is on the First Wave: the women and men who paved the way for later movements and progress. For information about the later women's rights movement, visit our sister park, Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument.

One of eight children born to Quaker parents on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793-1880) dedicated her life to the goal of human equality. As a child Mott attended Nine Partners, a Quaker boarding school located in New York, where she learned of the horrors of slavery from her readings and from visiting lecturers such as Elias Hicks, a well-known Quaker abolitionist. She also saw that women and men were not treated equally, even among the Quakers, when she discovered that female teachers at Nine Partners earned less than males. At a young age Lucretia Coffin Mott became determined to put an end to such social injustices.

In 1833 Mott, along with Mary Ann M’Clintock and nearly 30 other female abolitionists, organized the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. She later served as a delegate from that organization to the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. It was there that she first met Elizabeth Cady Stanton , who was attending the convention with her husband Henry, a delegate from New York. Mott and Stanton were indignant at the fact that women were excluded from participating in the convention simply because of their sex, and that indignation would result in a discussion about holding a woman’s rights convention. Stanton later recalled this conversation in the History of Woman Suffrage :

As Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wended their way arm in arm down Great Queen Street that night, reviewing the exciting scenes of the day, they agreed to hold a woman’s rights convention on their return to America, as the men to whom they had just listened had manifested their great need of some education on that question. Thus a missionary work for the emancipation of woman…was then and there inaugurated.

Eight years later, on July 19 and 20, 1848, Mott, Stanton, Mary Ann M’Clintock, Martha Coffin Wright , and Jane Hunt acted on this idea when they organized the First Woman’s Rights Convention .

Throughout her life Mott remained active in both the abolition and women’s rights movements. She continued to speak out against slavery, and in 1866 she became the first president of the American Equal Rights Association, an organization formed to achieve equality for African Americans and women.

Margaret Wilson Pryor (1785-1874) was best known simply as "Aunt Margaret" within her circle of reformers, friends and relatives. And her husband was "Uncle George." This active reform couple was quite a bit older than those with whom they associated and seemed to be universally liked and respected. Their teenage grandniece remarked in 1853, "I like to have them [visit] they are such nice old people."

Margaret was born in Philadelphia, the daughter of Quakers John and Sarah Wilson. She and signer/organizer Mary Ann M'Clintock were half-sisters. In 1816 Margaret married George Pryor, five years her senior. They moved to northern New York State a few years later, before moving to Skaneateles where they owned a boarding school. In the late 1830s they joined the M'Clintock family in Waterloo.

For most of her long life, Margaret Pryor was a constant in abolition, woman's rights, Hicksite Quaker organizational reforms and other social movements of the nineteenth-century. Margaret provided many reformers with the comforts of home when they were traveling, including American Anti-Slavery Society lecturer, Abby Kelley. In the 1840s Margaret accompanied Kelley on her anti-slavery speaking tours, guarding her from hecklers and acting as her clerk. Elizabeth Cady Stanton once remarked "Abby used to say she always felt safe when she could see Margaret Pryor's Quaker bonnet."

Pryor attended the First Woman's Rights Convention with her son, George W. Pryor , who also signed the Declaration of Sentiments . Margaret Pryor was among a group of Hicksite Quakers who formed the Congregational Friends in October of 1848 along with a number of other Quaker families who supported the woman's rights convention in Seneca Falls.

In later life, Margaret and her family continued their reform activities. Margaret voted in the presidential election of 1868 along with her daughter-in-law, Lucetta Brown Pryor and a large contingent of women in the reform community of Vineland, New Jersey. This protest action foreshadowed the more organized New Departure strategy of the National Woman Suffrage Association to test the constitutionality of voting rights for women.

Eighty-nine year old Margaret was living with the M'Clintock family in Philadelphia, when Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton visited all of them for tea. Margaret was anxious to see Mott and Stanton and they climbed up to her third floor bedroom to visit with their old friend. Margaret died a year later and was buried beside George in Vineland, New Jersey.

Mary Ann M’Clintock (1800-1884) was born to Quaker parents. She married Thomas M’Clintock , a druggist and fellow Quaker, in 1820, and they lived in Philadelphia for seventeen years. During that time Mary Ann gave birth to four daughters, Elizabeth , Mary Ann , Sarah, and Julia and a son, Charles. She was recognized by her fellow Quakers as a minister and leader. By 1833 M’Clintock was a social activist when she along with Lucretia Mott and others, became founding members of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.

In 1836 the family moved to Waterloo, New York, where they would join a network of Quaker abolitionists that included Richard and Jane Hunt and George and Margaret Pryor , Mary Ann’s half-sister. They lived in a house owned and built by Richard Hunt at 14 East Williams Street, and ran a drugstore and school in one of Hunt’s commercial buildings behind their house on Main Street in Waterloo.

In 1842, at an annual convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society held in Rochester, New York, Thomas and Mary Ann became founding members of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society and helped write its constitution. They were joined by Frederick Douglass , Jane and Richard Hunt, Isaac and Amy Post , George and Margaret Pryor.

Mary Ann became an organizer of the First Woman’s Rights Convention when she joined a group of friends on July 9, 1848, in the front parlor of the Hunts’ home . She hosted a second planning meeting at her house on July 16, where she, Elizabeth Cady Stanton , and possibly several others drafted the Declaration of Sentiments that was read, discussed, and ratified in the Wesleyan Chapel .

While living in Waterloo, Mary Ann and Thomas M’Clintock became very active in the local Hicksite Quaker community, the Junius Monthly Meeting. In October of 1848 they led several hundred members of the Hicksite community to form the new Progressive Friends or Friends of Human Progress. Thomas and Mary Ann served as clerk and associate clerk at nearly every yearly meeting while they lived in Waterloo.

Elizabeth Cady was born in Johnstown, New York on November 12, 1815, the daughter of Daniel Cady, a lawyer, a judge, and land speculator, and Margaret Livingston Cady. Elizabeth was educated at a local boys school and graduated from the Troy Female Seminary in Troy, New York in 1832. She met Henry Brewster Stanton in Peterboro, New York, at the home of her cousin, philanthropist Gerrit Smith. Henry was a popular abolitionist speaker and frequently stopped at the Smith home in the course of his lecture circuit. Against her family’s wishes, she married Henry on May 1, 1840, in a ceremony that omitted the vow “to obey.” Their honeymoon was a trip to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where Henry was a delegate representing the American Anti-Slavery Society. At the 1840 Convention, elected women delegates were refused admission because of their sex. After a prolonged debate, it was decided that the women would sit at the rear of the hall, but not participate. Lucretia Mott, the Quaker reformer, was among the group sent from the floor. In the women’s section she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who shared her indignation at this treatment of women. Stanton and Mott became friends, and vowed to hold a convention, immediately upon returning to the United States, to discuss the injustices against women.

When the Stantons finished with their London trip, they returned to Johnstown, where Henry studied law with Judge Cady. After Henry passed the bar exam, they set up housekeeping and started a family in Albany and then moved to Boston. Henry joined a law practice and they both became active in reform circles. They moved to Seneca Falls in 1847, as Henry was in poor health and needed a change. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s father invited her and her family to live in a house he owned at 32 Washington Street. In June 1847, Daniel Cady transfered the deed to the property to his daughter. In Seneca Falls Elizabeth Cady Stanton first experienced the difficulties facing a wife and mother in an isolated 19th-century household. She lacked the intellectual and cultural stimulation she had enjoyed in Boston and found herself overwhelmed by childcare and housework. She later wrote in her autobiography: “The general discontent I felt with women’s portion as wife, mother, housekeeper, physician, and spiritual guide, the chaotic conditions into which everything fell without constant supervision, impressed me with a strange feeling that some active measures should be taken to remedy the wrongs…of women.”

This newfound understanding of women’s “proper sphere” led Stanton to complain vehemently to four other women friends about its injustice at a gathering held July 9, 1848, at the home of Jane and Richard Hunt. These four women (Lucretia Mott, Mary Ann M’Clintock, Martha Wright, and Jane Hunt – all wives and mothers) understood Stanton’s frustrations. Also, as active anti-slavery and temperance reformers, they had experienced discrimination by male coworkers. Together they decided to call a woman’s rights convention to publicly discuss these injustices against women. Lucretia Mott later reminded Stanton, “Remember, the first convention originated with thee.”

For Elizabeth Cady Stanton, actually taking the first step to change her unhappy state made all the difference. She began to write, recruit, strategize, network, and organize for the cause of women’s rights. By 1859 her family responsibilities kept her at home with her husband and seven children to look after. Stanton managed to combine her public and private lives by opening her home to those who were free to travel and speak about advocating equal rights for women. She called her home “The Center of the Rebellion.” In May 1851, Amelia Bloomer introduced Susan B. Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Thus began a friendship which lasted over fifty years. As a single woman, Anthony was free of many of the domestic duties that tied Stanton to her home, which allowed Anthony to travel and make speeches promoting women’s rights. To give Stanton time to write those speeches, Anthony visited Seneca Falls and helped care for the growing Stanton family. She then took the speeches and writings produced by Stanton and traveled the countryside campaigning for women’s rights.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a determined advocate and unwavering voice for full rights of citizenship for women and nothing less. In 1862, the Stanton family moved to New York City, where Stanton continued to work for the women’s rights movement in the U.S. and abroad. She believed that the movement should work for a broad platform of change for women’s citizenship, including: woman suffrage, dress reform, girls’ sports, equal employment, property rights, equal wages, divorce and custody law reform, collective households, coeducation, and religious reform. After her children were grown Stanton wrote and lectured on all aspects of women’s rights and on many other current topics as well. She began to travel the county, and her talks on women’s issues were popular and well received. She also co-authored the three volume History of Woman Suffrage, before publishing her autobiography and the controversial Woman’s Bible. Though ill health prevented her from traveling much in later life, she continued to write on women’s rights until her death in 1902.

Martha Coffin Wright (1806-75) was the youngest of eight children and the sister of Lucretia Coffin Mott . Wright is described by Ann D. Gordon, editor of the Stanton and Anthony papers, as "a stalwart of the state antislavery society and ...one of the inner circle of woman's rights leaders until the end of her life. An avid letter writer and wit, she left a valuable archives of correspondence on woman's rights and woman suffrage." (Stanton and Anthony Papers, Vol 1, 75)

In 1848 Wright was living with her husband David and four children in Auburn, New York, ten miles to the east of Seneca Falls. Martha Wright was several months pregnant that summer, and Lucretia and James Mott were staying with Martha and her family. On July 19, 1848, the first day of the Seneca Falls First Women’s Rights Convention , Lucretia Mott and Martha Wright arrived by train from Auburn and accepted Elizabeth Cady Stanton ’s invitation to stay the night at her home before attending the second day’s activities. At the afternoon session on the first day, the Report noted that “Lucretia Mott read a humorous article from a newspaper, written by Martha C. Wright.”

After organizing the First Women’s Rights Convention, Martha Wright continued her active involvement in state and national women’s rights conventions of the 1850s. She spoke and served as secretary at the Syracuse convention in 1852, Cleveland in 1853, and New York City in 1856. She served as vice president in Philadelphia in 1854 and presided over national woman's rights convention in Saratoga and Cincinnati in 1855 and New York City in 1860.

Martha C. Wright was also an ardent abolitionist and friend of Harriet Tubman . She ran her home in Auburn as a station on the Underground Railroad , frequently allowing freedom seekers to sleep in the kitchen. In a letter to her daughter Ellen on December 30, 1860, Martha C. Wright wrote:

…We have been expending our sympathies, as well as congratulations, on seven newly arrived slaves that Harriet Tubman has just pioneered safely from the Southern Part of Maryland.--One woman carried a baby all the way and bro’t [sic] two other chld’n that Harriet and the men helped along. They bro’t a piece of old comfort and a blanket, in a basket with a little kindling, a little bread for the baby with some laudanum to keep it from crying during the day. They walked all night carrying the little ones, and spread the old comfort on the frozen ground, in some dense thicket where they all hid, while Harriet went out foraging, and sometimes cd not get back till dark, fearing she wd be followed. Then, if they had crept further in, and she couldn’t find them, she wd whistle, or sing certain hymns and they wd answer.

Jane Clothier Master Hunt was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on June 26, 1812, the daughter of William and Mary Master. Her marriage to Richard Pell Hunt in November 1845 brought her to Waterloo as part of the extended family of Hunts, M'Clintocks, Mounts, Plants, and Pryors, all of them related to Richard P. Hunt as sisters, nieces, in-laws, or siblings of in-laws. At least one person from each of these nuclear families signed the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments , including Jane and Richard Hunt, four M'Clintocks, Lydia Mount and her daughter Mary E. Vail , Hannah Plant , and George and Margaret Pryor . While these family ties seem complicated, all of them reflect the importance of sibling relationships and the responsibilities that brothers and sisters also felt for nieces and nephews. All of these families were of Quaker background. All of them had migrated to Waterloo either from Philadelphia or from eastern New YorkState.

Jane's marriage at age thirty-three made her the step-mother of three older children, all born to Richard's third wife, Sarah M'Clintock Hunt --Richard, born July 4, 1838; Mary M., born in 1839; and Sarah M., born in 1841. On October 6, 1846, two years after her marriage, Jane bore her own first child, a son named William Master Hunt. Less than a month before the Seneca Falls convention , on June 23, 1848, she gave birth to a daughter, Jane M., whom they called Jenny. Jane’s third child, George Truman Hunt was born on April 18, 1852. The Hunts named him after Jane’s brother in law, George Truman. Truman was married to Jane’s sister Catharine and was a Quaker minister and physician living in Philadelphia. He attended Richard P Hunt during his final illness in 1856. The Hunts, M’Clintocks and Trumans frequently visited each other in Waterloo and Philadelphia. A fourth child, Anna, died at birth in March of 1854.

In 1850, the Hunt household, like those of many other signers, included not only Jane and Richard Hunt and their children but also three non-related members. George Hunter was an Irish-born laborer, aged thirty. Ann McClelland, also Irish-born, was twenty-five. Both probably worked in the Hunt household. Elizabeth Kinnard, only thirteen years old, also lived with the Hunts.

Jane's marriage to Richard P. Hunt made her the wife of one of the richest men in Seneca County, and their home at 6 Main Street on the Seneca Turnpike (now Routes 5 and 20), just east of the village of Waterloo, reflected their prosperity. The house was an eleven-room brick Federal-style mansion with a central hallway, old-fashioned for the 1840s but commodious. They lived in considerable comfort, with carpeted floors, upholstered sofas, rocking chairs in the sitting room and the parlor, astral lamps, window shades (probably painted) in the parlor, curtained windows in the sitting room and bedrooms, and a full complement of dinner ware, silver teaspoons, glasses, and candle sticks. They kept a horse, four carriages, and a sleigh in the barn.

When several Quaker women decided to invite Lucretia Mott , a well-known minister and reformer from Philadelphia, to visit Waterloo in July 1848, Jane Hunt offered her house for the meeting. On Sunday, July 9, 1848, Mott arrived at the Hunt house with her sister, Martha Wright , from Auburn, New York. Mary Ann M'Clintock of Waterloo was also there. So was one other woman, the only non-Quaker, Elizabeth Cady Stanton . Stanton had first met Lucretia Mott at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, when Stanton was on her honeymoon. When the London meeting refused to admit women delegates from the U.S., Stanton remembered, the women had agreed to hold a meeting when they returned home solely to discuss the rights of women. Now, seeing Mott again after many years apart inspired Stanton once more. She "poured out her long-standing discontent," . . . .

The women decided to hold a meeting "for protest and discussion." Richard P. Hunt may have encouraged this decision, for family legend suggests that, practical Quaker that he was, he reminded them that "faith without works is dead." The women decided to meet quickly, before Mott returned home to Philadelphia. Around the Hunts' tea table, they drafted a brief notice announcing, "A Convention to discuss the social, civic and religious condition and rights of Woman will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel at Seneca Falls, N. Y., on Wednesday and Thursday, the 19th and 20th of July. . . ." The notice was delivered to the offices of the Seneca County Courier in Seneca Falls, where it first appeared on Tuesday, July 11. Without that gathering of Quaker women who were experienced in the strategy and tactics of the abolition movement, energized by Stanton around Jane Hunt's tea table, there would have been no Seneca Falls convention.

Richard P. Hunt died November 7, 1856, leaving Jane a widow with six children eighteen years old and younger. Jane C. Hunt continued the family's tradition of philanthropy when she gave to St. Paul's Episcopal Church the land for St. John's Chapel on the east side of Chapel Street in Waterloo. She lived in the family home until her own death while on a visit to her daughter in Chicago on November 28, 1889, aged 77. She was buried next to her husband in Maple Grove Cemetery in Waterloo.

Amy Post (1803-1889) and her husband Isaac, lived in Rochester, New York. They were Hicksite Quakers who joined the Thomas and Mary Ann M'Clintock and Richard and Jane Hunt in forming the new Progressive Friends or Friends of Human Progress in October of 1848.

Amy Post was also an ardent abolitionist and founding member of the New York Western Anti-Slavery Society in 1842. Post served on a committee with Mary Ann and Elizabeth M'Clintock to organize the first anti-slavery fundraising fair in western New York. Together the women raised $300.

The Posts are mentioned by Frederick Douglass in his letter to Elizabeth M'Clintock . Douglass wrote:

Dear Elizabeth, To be sure I will do myself the pleasure of accepting your kind invitation to attend the proposed woman's Convention at Seneca Falls. I think that one or two or more of the Post family will be present also. Your notice did not reach me in time for this paper -- but happily I received one from our mutual Friend Lucretia Mott. With Dear love to the family I am most Sincerely Yours Frederick Douglass July. 14.(1848) Rochester

At the First Woman's Rights Convention , Amy Post participated in the second day's morning session where she and several others freely discussed the Declaration of Sentiments . She was also appointed to be on the committee to prepare the Proceedings of the Convention for publication.

Lydia Hunt Mount, sister of Richard P. Hunt, was one of the large clan of Hunts and M'Clintocks who signed the Declaration of Sentiments at the Seneca Falls women's rights convention. Affiliated with the Junius Monthly Meeting of Friends (Quakers) at Waterloo and with each other as brothers and sisters, they lived in their daily lives those ideals of equality which they espoused more formally at the Seneca Falls women's rights convention. Lydia Hunt Mount was forty-six years old when she attended the women's rights convention. She had been born about 1800 in Westchester County, New York, the daughter of Richard Hunt and Mary Pell Hunt. In 1824 or 1825, she married Randolph Mount (born January 31, 1793). Sometime afterward, they moved to Geneva, New York, where Randolph worked as a merchant and where their first child, an infant daughter Caroline, was born and died (January 1826-February 1827). They had three more children--all girls--Mary Elenor (born in 1827), Emeline (born December 29, 1929), and Eliza Jane (born about 1834). About 1827, they moved from Geneva to Mount Road, where they bought a farm in the Township of Seneca Falls to live near her brother, Richard P. Hunt, and her sister, Hannah Hunt Plant. After a long illness, Randolph died of consumption (perhaps tuberculosis) on April 2, 1842, when he was only 49 years old. By the time he died, Randolph Mount had amassed considerable wealth.

He, like his brother-in-law, owned both his farm and investments in local commercial and manufacturing enterprises. An inventory of his possessions after his death included not only comfortable furnishings for their house but also farm implements, seven cows, 102 sheep and 47 lambs, one breeding sow, one span of horses, twenty-five acres of wheat on the ground, eighty cords of wood in the woods, thirty shares of stock in the Waterloo Woolen Manufacturing Company, forty shares of stock in the Seneca County Bank, and several outstanding loans, for a total value of $4702.83. This accounting did not include his land. By 1850, Lydia Hunt Mount counted her real estate assets as $13,800. As a widow with three children, Lydia Hunt Mount was thus quite well off financially. She also had the support of her brother, Richard P. Hunt, who took his responsibilities as uncle of three young girls seriously. On October 1, 1844, when she was only seventeen years old, Lydia's oldest living daughter, Mary Elenor Mount, married Gilbert Vail. (For more on Mary Mount Vail, see her biography in this volume.) Richard P. Hunt helped to educate Emeline and Eliza Jane, sending them to a boarding school in Ithaca. Emeline later married Benjamin Billings Bacon. She died February 25, 1888. Eliza Jane married Septimus Swift and lived for many years in the Swift mansion on Main Street in Waterloo before moving to Rochester, where she died. By 1850, Lydia Hunt Mount shared her home with her older sister, Hannah Hunt Plant (aged 55 and also a widow), Hannah's daughter, Henrietta Matilda (aged 23), and one Irish girl, Mary Hackett (aged 13). (For more on Hannah Hunt Plant, see her biography in this volume.) If Lydia Mount had kept the furniture in their home at her husband's death, this family of women lived very comfortably, with a sofa, large mirror, mahogany tea table, clock, three rocking chairs, several side chairs, a portable desk, and blinds over each window in their carpeted parlor, with brass andirons in the fireplace and a hearth rug in front of the parlor stove. They could dine, if they chose, with crockery dinner sets and take their tea with silver spoons. They may or may not have sold the pleasure carriage and the span of horses that Randolph Mount had left. By 1862, Lydia Hunt Mount and Hannah Plant were both living at 100 Williams Street, Waterloo. Lydia Mount died on December 23, 1868, aged 68, and she is buried next to her husband in Maple Grove Cemetery, Waterloo, New York, under a tombstone that reads, "Our Mother Sleeps."

The oldest child of progressive Quakers Thomas and Mary Ann M’Clintock , Elizabeth Wilson M’Clintock was born in Philadelphia in 1821.

On July 16, 1848 Elizabeth M'Clintock participated in the convention planning meeting at her parent's home. Before the meeting she received the following letter - Grassmere [Seneca Falls] Friday morning [July 14,1848] Dear Lizzie [Elizabeth M'Clintock],

Rain or shine I intend to spend Sunday with you that we may all together concoct a declaration I have drawn up one but you may suggest any alterations & improvements for I know it is not as perfect a declaration as should go forth from the first woman’s rights convention that has ever assembled. I shall take the ten o’clock train in the morning & return at five in the evening, provided we can accomplish all our business in that time. I have written to Lydia Maria Child Maria Chapman & Sarah Grimke, as we hope for some good letters to read at the convention. Your friend

At the First Woman’s Rights Convention in 1848, she addressed the audience on July 19 during the afternoon session and was on the committee responsible for publishing the minutes of the convention.

She was also responsible for inviting Frederick Douglass , a friend through the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, to the convention. He accepted her invitation, writing,

Dear Elizabeth, To be sure I will do myself the pleasure of accepting your kind invitation to attend the proposed woman’s Convention at Seneca Falls. I think that one or two or more of the Post family will be present also. Your notice did not reach me in time for this paper – but happily I received one from our mutual Friend Lucretia Mott. With Dear love to the family

Elizabeth’s avid interest in women’s rights was fueled by her determination to see women accepted in the so-called “public sphere” of business, an area dominated by men in the 19 th century. The 1850 census reveals that Elizabeth M’Clintock was the only woman in Waterloo listed with an occupation, which was clerk in her father’s drugstore. In 1849 Elizabeth asked Lucretia Mott 's son-in-law, Edward Davis, to accept her as an apprentice in his silk business in Philadelphia. Davis replied that she was too old to join the business and did not have the requisite experience. Some of his employees responded with open hostility to her request, lampooning the notion of a woman working outside her “proper sphere.” Elizabeth responded with a series of cartoons depicting the benefits that could be derived by including women in the workforce. In 1861 Elizabeth was given the opportunity to open her own shawl and hosiery business in Philadelphia with the financial backing of her father, and she proved a capable businesswoman.

Like the rest of her family, Elizabeth was also committed to the abolition of slavery. In 1843 she and Rhoda Bement organized an antislavery fair in Seneca Falls to raise money for the antislavery movement. An advertisement for the fair appeared in the October 4, 1843 edition of the Seneca Falls Observer :

ANTI-SLAVERY FAIR will be open at the Temperance Hall, in Seneca Falls, Wednesday and Thursday Oct. 4 th and 5th at 2 o’clock P.M. and continue open through the evenings.

A most beautiful variety of useful and fancy articles, many of which have been contributed from Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Albany, Boston, and many other places, will give the inhabitants of this vicinity an opportunity to supply themselves while at the same time while at the same time they aid the cause of the perishing slave.

Admittance 12 ½ cts. ‘Come and help the cause along.’ In behalf of the fair, Rhoda Bement E. W. M’Clintock

In 1852 Elizabeth married Burroughs Phillips, a lawyer and the nephew of fellow convention organizer Jane Hunt . He died just two years later after falling from his carriage and landing on his head. Elizabeth never remarried.

Born in Philadelphia in 1822, Mary was the second child of her father, Thomas, and her mother, Mary Ann, for whom she was named. Some historic references list her as Mary Ann M'Clintock Jr. From an early age, Mary was a participant in her family’s reform activities.

As the daughter of Quaker activists, Mary, like her older sister Elizabeth, took part in Anti-Slavery, Temperance, and Woman’s Rights events. Her signature can be found on anti-slavery petitions dating to her teenage years, demonstrating an early interest in movements for equality.

The Report of the Woman’s Rights Convention indicates that Mary, like her mother, her father, and sister, took an active part in the proceedings. In addition to seating attendees, circulating the Declaration of Sentiments for signatures, and signing her name to the Declaration, Mary served as secretary and kept a clear record of the two days’ proceedings. On the last evening, July 20 th , Mary delivered an address to all those present. According to the convention minutes it was “a short but impressive address, calling upon woman to arouse from her lethargy and be true to herself and her God.”

Hannah Hunt Plant was one of the community of Quakers affiliated with Junius Monthly Meeting in Waterloo. Like many of these Friends, she signed the Declaration of Sentiments with other family members, including her brother and sister-in-law (Richard P. and Jane Hunt), her sister (Lydia Mount), and her niece (Mary E. Vail). Hannah Hunt Plant was born about 1795 in Westchester County, New York, oldest living child of Richard and Mary Pell Hunt. She married Henry Plant and had a daughter, Henrietta Matilda, born about 1826-7. Henry Plant died in Batavia, New York, in 1843, leaving Hannah as the administrator of his estate. An inventory of their possessions indicated a comfortable but not wealthy lifestyle. They owned a horse and buggy worth $100, a mahogany table worth $12, a mahogany side board worth $30, a $25 "sopha," and a dining set worth $25. Henry's gold watch was valued at $75, and cash on hand at his death amounted to $165. The total value of their possessions, not including land, amounted to $663.06.

By 1850, Hannah Hunt Plant and her daughter were living with Hannah's sister, Lydia Hunt Mount, Lydia's two teenaged daughters, and a thirteen-year-old Irish-born girl, Mary Hackett. In 1862, they occupied a house at 100 Williams Street in Waterloo. Although Hannah Hunt Plant came from a Quaker background, on August 1, 1858, she and her daughter joined St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Waterloo.

Cynthia Davis is one of those signers about whom we know just enough to be able to make some speculations about why she came to the Seneca Falls convention but not enough to describe her in much detail.

In 1848, Cynthia Fuller Davis was twenty-six years old. She had been born somewhere in New York State. On November 14, 1839, she had married Niles Davis of New Hartford, Connecticut. Perhaps (or perhaps not) Niles Davis was related to the Davis family who were members of the Junius Monthly Meeting of Friends. By 1850, Niles Davis had disappeared, and Cynthia Fuller Davis was living in Waterloo with physician Ansel Fuller and his wife Catherine Fuller, perhaps her brother and sister-in-law. Ansel Fuller was Massachusetts-born, thirty-six years old in 1848, while his wife Catharine was a year younger.

The Fullers lived in Waterloo in 1850, but Ansel, at least, had connections in Seneca Falls. He had once belonged to the Methodist Episcopal Church in Seneca Falls but had been dismissed by letter in April 1841. And on April 5, 1850, he would sign an anti-slavery petition sent to Congress from Seneca Falls.

Cynthia Davis may have gone to the convention with her next-door neighbor, Margaret Jenkins, who was also a signer.

Phebe King illustrates the difficulty of identifying women in history, when much of the historical record focuses on men. A Phebe King, aged twenty-three, married Nestor Woodworth in the Town of Covert, Seneca County, in 1849 and died in 1863, aged thirty-six. Nothing else is known of her, however. Since no other known signers came from Covert, this Phebe King remains a mystery.

A second Phebe King was listed in the 1850 census for Waterloo, however. She was fifty-six years old, born in Connecticut, head of a household that included two younger women--Julia Drake, aged thirty-six, who was also a signer of the Declaration of Sentiments, and Eliza Lawton, aged twenty-seven--as well as Eliza's six-year-old daughter Florena. Were these Phebe King's daughters and grand-daughter, or were they simply boarders? Her residence in Waterloo, home of many other signers, and the presence in her household of Julia Drake, another signer, make it likely that this Phebe King was indeed the one who attended the women's rights convention. She may also have been related to other King families in the local area.

A William H. King was a prominent and wealthy merchant in Seneca Falls, 58 years old in 1850, an elder in the Presbyterian Church, and a signer of the 1850 anti-slavery petition from Seneca Falls. No Phebe appeared in his household in the 1850 census, however.

Yet another King, John G. King, lived in Seneca Falls in the 1840s and 1850s but was not listed in the 1850 census. In 1854, Dun and Bradstreet gave him a glowing recommendation. "In bus. 15 yrs." read the report, "never failed. Gd. char. & habs.--caref. & prudt. educates his famy. well. Owns a ho & lot & is w $2 m." In 1857, the agent noted that King was "one of the most enterprising thriving mechanics in this part of the Co." His abolitionist sympathies were clear as clear as his business reputation: he was a charter member and trustee of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, where the women's rights convention met, and he attended the Free Soil convention in Buffalo in 1848.

The abolitionist connections of both of these men might suggest their connection with a supporter for the women's rights convention. Since William H. King was 58 years old in 1850, and John G. King was forty-two, neither of them could have been Phebe's sons. Were they in fact her brothers-in-law? Without further evidence, Phebe King's family and community connections remain lost.

Julia Ann Drake was born about 1814 somewhere in New York State. She is one of those signers for whom evidence is skimpy and difficult to analyze. In 1850, she lived, perhaps as a boarder or perhaps as a daughter, with Phebe King, another signer of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments.

A Julia Ann Drake--perhaps the same person, perhaps not--was admitted to the Seneca Falls Presbyterian Church on profession of faith on January 16, 1839, and dismissed to the Auburn Presbyterian Church on February 10, 1841. (In 1844, a Julia Ann Grimsha returned to the Seneca Falls Presbyterians from Auburn. Perhaps this Julia Ann Drake had married while in Auburn, so that she is not the signer of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments after all.) Another Julia Ann Drake, living in Romulus in 1852, married John B Smith, also of Romulus, on July 18, 1852. Again, this may or may not the signer. Finally, several other Julia Ann Drakes appear in Drake genealogies.

Until further information comes to light, we cannot know for certain which of these Julia Ann Drakes, if any of them, is the real signer of the Declaration of Sentiments.

In 1920, seventy-two years after the Seneca Falls convention, the United States finally passed the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Of the sixty-eight women who signed the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls in 1848, only one--Charlotte Woodward Pierce--lived to see that day. "I was at the first meeting held at Seneca Falls," she remembered, "when I was but a young girl, little knowing the broad field awaiting laborers." In 1848, Charlotte Woodward was eighteen or nineteen years old, probably of Quaker background and living in Waterloo, New York. Although she had been a school teacher when she was fifteen years old, she worked at home in 1848, sewing gloves from pieces sent out by merchant-capitalists. Charlotte Woodward was not happy with her limited opportunities. "I do not believe there was any community anywhere in which the souls of some women were not beating their wings in rebellion. . . . Every fiber of my being rebelled, although silently, for all the hours that I sat and sewed gloves for a miserable pittance which, after it was earned, could never be mine. I wanted to work, but I wanted to choose my task and I wanted to collect my wages."

With such awareness, Charlotte Woodward was delighted when she read the announcement for the woman's rights convention. Historian Rheta Childe Dorr described Charlotte's reaction, based on an interview with her in 1920. She ran from one house to another in her neighborhood, and found other women reading it, some with amusement and incredulity, others with absorbed interest. Half a dozen of Charlotte's intimate friends were interested enough to agree with her that they must attend the convention, at least on the first day when only members of their own sex would be present. . . . Early on the morning of July 19 those country girls started on their long drive, in a democrat wagon drawn by fat farm horses. . . . As they drove along they perceived an unusual number of vehicles, family carriages, chaises, surreys, democrats and even farm wagons, turning in from lanes and byways to join the procession on the main high road. Women formed the majority of the passengers, but some of the vehicles were driven by men. When the girls arrived at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls they found about fifty men waiting to be admitted to a meeting advertised for women only. Mrs. Pierce remembered that it was the presence of these uncommonly liberal men that gave her courage to stay over for the second day's session.

Charlotte Woodward traveled farther than almost anyone else who came to the Seneca Falls convention. According to the index of the 1850 census, published by the Mormons, only one Charlotte Woodward lived in New York State in 1850. She lived in DeWitt, Onondaga County (near Syracuse, about 40 miles east of Seneca Falls) in the home of Moses and Hannah Chapman, aged 58 and 55. Moses was a farmer, born in Connecticut, who listed his assets at $15,000, quite a munificent sum in 1850. Other members of the household included Amos Fancher (22, farmer), Rachel Jones (13), John Doyle (15), Mary M. Carthe (perhaps meant to be McCarthy, age 80, born in Ireland), and Calton E. Chapman (79).

Charlotte Woodward eventually married (Newlin? Pierce) and moved to Bristol [Rhode Island?] and later to Philadelphia, where she lived the rest of her life. She joined the American Woman Suffrage Association rather than the National Woman Suffrage Association, which Stanton and Anthony had organized, but, she wrote to Mott in 1871, "our aim is the same, what matter if we do not all choose the same means to accomplish it?" She also became active in the Association for the Advancement of Women. She knew Susan B. Anthony and called her "a great and noble woman."

Her conciliatory attitude toward all branches of the suffrage movement lasted until her death. In 1921, when she was 92 years old, she sent a trowel to the National Woman's Party, to be used in laying a cornerstone for the NWP's headquarters in Washington, D.C. The inscription read, "In memory of the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848: presented by its sole survivor, Mrs. Charlotte L. Pierce, in thanksgiving for progress made by women and in honor of the National Woman's Party, which will carry on the struggle so bravely begun." When observers took this as an endorsement of a party for women only, Woodward Pierce quickly clarified her views. The National Woman's Party, she said, "seems to be a woman's party. I do not believe in that. I think women should go into the existing parties." "My heart is with all women who vote. They have gained it now, and they should not quarrel about the method of using it."

Sadly, Charlotte L. Woodward Pierce herself never voted. She was ill on election day, 1920, and by the spring of 1921, her eyesight failing rapidly, she was confined to her home. "I'm too old," she said. "I'm afraid I'll never vote." And, as far as we know, she never did.

Rachel Dell Bonnel was one of the younger generation of the large community of Quakers affiliated with the Junius Monthly Meeting of Friends in Waterloo. Like many of them, she was related to other signers, including her mother's brother William Dell and his son Thomas Dell, both of whom lived on the farm next door to Deanna's own family.

Rachel Dell Bonnel was born July 30, 1827, the oldest of Charles Bonnel and Deanna Dell Bonnel's five children. Embedded in a network of extended family, Charles and Deanna named their first child after her maternal grandmother, Rachel Dell. Their second child and first son was Henry, named after his paternal grandfather. Charles Bonnel had come to the old Township of Junius from Randolph County, New Jersey, in 1804, when Charles was only three years old. His parents were poor, but they raised their many children carefully in the Quaker tradition. In 1815, the family moved to Wayne County. Charles Bonnel left his parent's home at age twenty, working first as a farm laborer and then as a farmer in Michigan. In 1826, Charles Bonnel returned to marry Deanna Dell, daughter of Richard and Rachel Dell, also Quakers, from Waterloo.

Although the young couple settled originally near his parents in Wayne County, they moved to Waterloo in 1831, to live across the road from both Deanna's parents and from her sister, Mary Dell, who had married Charles' brother, Henry. Next door lived Deanna's brother, Thomas Dell.

Charles and Deanna prospered in their new home. In 1831, Charles bought 175 acres on lots 66 and 79. By 1850, they owned property worth $9600. By 1876, "by strict attention to business, coupled with untiring industry and perseverance," as the History of Seneca County, Charles Bonnel had acquired more than seven hundred acres of land, making him one of the largest landowners in Waterloo Township. His brother, Henry, was equally diligent, acquiring six hundred acres of land. Henry would borrow money to buy land, work hard to make it productive, pay off the debt, and immediately use the money to buy more land. Charles obviously had a similar capacity for hard work and a similar ability to take risks successfully.

Both Deanna and Charles took their Quaker commitments seriously. For thirteen years, from May 1832 until April 1845, Deanna was clerk of the women's meeting of the Junius Monthly Meeting of Friends. Charles also was an active Quaker. Opposed to all war, he refused to pay war taxes. As a result, he was fined, imprisoned, and had his property impounded.

On November 8, 1848, only four months after she signed the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls, nineteen-year-old Rachel Dell Bonnel married Edmund W. Mitchell, five years older than she was.

Edmund Mitchell died on February 22, 1886, and was buried in the Quaker cemetery on Nine Foot Road in Waterloo under a large obelisk. Rachel D. Bonnel's maiden name is also listed on the obelisk, with only her birth date engraved. Nearby stands one small stone labeled simply "Father." A large cedar tree shades the graves.

Of all signers of the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments , only Rhoda Palmer lived to vote, not in 1920 as a result of the nineteenth amendment, but in 1918, when New York State passed its own woman suffrage law. Palmer's vote was the culmination of a long-time dream, the fulfillment of ideals of equality that she had developed from her earliest years as a Quaker , an abolitionist, and a woman' rights advocate.

Rhoda Palmer was born on June 25, 1816, the seventh of nine children born to Asa Palmer and Abigail Wooden Palmer in a house built by her father on Lyons Road, two miles north of Geneva, New York. Her father was a farmer, born in Rhode Island. Her mother came from Orange County, New York.

By 1850, neither rich nor poor, they had acquired land, livestock, tools and buildings worth about $3500. When she was still a little girl, people still lived in traditional ways. They used animals for power and wood for fuel. Women still made cloth at home. Native Americans were still very much a presence among white settlers. They would often camp in the area around her house. She would visit their homes, and they would visit hers. One night, four Indian women and a child slept all night on their kitchen floor. No railroads or canals had yet been completed through New York State. Only stage coaches, horses and wagons, drovers with cattle, sheep, and pigs came through the toll gates on the Seneca Turnpike. The tradition of the American Revolution was still very much alive. Some men still wore their hair in long braids down their back, in the style of the eighteenth century. And Rhoda's own grandfather, one of the first white settlers in the Geneva area, remained a cripple all his life from wounds he received as a soldier in the Revolution.

As a teenager, Rhoda Palmer saw her world expand. She attended the young ladies' seminary in Geneva. She saw the launching of the first steamboat, the Seneca Chief, on Seneca Lake. The Erie Canal had been finished in 1825. In the summer of 1836, when she was twenty-one years old, she traveled to Chicago, then a small town of only 6000 people. She took the Erie Canal to Buffalo and rode steamboats on the Great Lakes. She saw Niagara Falls for the first time in 1840, and she traveled widely to Philadelphia, New York, New England, and the upper Midwest.

All her life, Rhoda Palmer was influenced by ideals of equality, rooted in the religious tradition of the Society of Friends. Although she was not a birthright Friend (her parents had joined Junius Monthly Meeting in 1817 and 1818, after Rhoda's birth), and she never officially joined a Quaker meeting, she always considered herself a Quaker, and she regularly attended Junius Monthly Meeting. Her egalitarian religious beliefs remained important to her to the end of her life. Even as an old lady, she was proud to claim descent from Roger Williams, one of the great architects of the ideal of religious freedom. In the seventeenth century, Roger Williams founded Rhode Island, where Quakers, Jews, Baptists, and others unwelcome in Massachusetts Bay could take refuge. As a Quaker at Junius Monthly Meeting, she met the M'Clintocks, the Priors, the Bonnels, and other strong advocates for abolitionism and women's rights. She and her family promoted these values in their own lives. Her father, she remembered, "was a great anti-slavery man," and they hosted self-emancipated slaves who came through their home on their way to Lake Ontario and Canada. She also heard Sojourner Truth and other abolitionist lecturers.

In 1848, she attended the Geneva Medical College's commencement ceremony, and there she saw the first woman (Elizabeth Blackwell) as well as the first Native American (Peter Wilson, a Seneca) graduate from medical school. Through this Quaker-abolitionist network, she learned about the proposed convention to discuss the "social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women" at Seneca Falls. Many years later, in 1915, when she was 99 years old, Rhoda Palmer wrote one of the few eye-witness accounts of that meeting.

It was largely attended," she remembered. "There was a society of Quakers (or friends as they called themselves) living in the town of Waterloo nearby. I think without exception every member was present. . . . The session lasted two days. Myself and father, Asa Palmer, attended it. Had an enjoyable time, excepting one little incident. Our carriage broke down on our way home, and we were obliged to stay over night on the road.

Rhoda Palmer never wavered in her commitment to woman's rights. Through her travels, she connected local efforts to national reform. In 1853, she attended a convention in New York City, where abolitionists, woman's rights advocates, and temperance reformers all gathered. There she listened to such famous abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendall Phillips. She remembered Ernestine Rose, born a Polish Jew, whose broken English made her the target for ridicule from young men in the audience. Palmer was especially impressed with Lucretia Mott . When Mott faced a long harangue from a man who believed, with St. Paul, that women should learn from their husbands at home, she simply waited quietly until he was finished, noted that "I don't agree," and quietly continued her own talk. Palmer, who always had a good sense of humor, also told a story about Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, perhaps the most influential paper in the country. To help the cause, Greeley organized a huge vegetarian banquet. He was worried, however, remembered Palmer, because there was no tomato soup.

In her later years, Rhoda Palmer became an accomplished painter. She lived in the house she had been born until she was 94 years old, when an injury forced her to move two doors away to live with a nephew. There she entertained friends, read, and maintained her strong commitment to women's rights. Rhoda Palmer outlived both her parents and her siblings, but, true to her Quaker tradition, she remained part of a close-knit family. For her one hundredth birthday, nieces and nephews from as far west as Michigan helped her celebrate. She gave an interview and sent a letter of reminiscences to the Geneva Daily Times. And she rode in an automobile, a major change from her youth, when ox carts and horses were the only way to travel. When local suffragists renewed their efforts to win the vote in the early twentieth century, they made an annual pilgrimage to visit Rhoda Palmer on her birthday. On the first Tuesday in November, 1918, when Rhoda Palmer was 102 years old, she was driven to the polls to cast her first ballot. "Her one wish that she would live to vote," noted the local newspaper, "was realized." She died August 9, 1919, aged 103 years old. She was buried with her parents and two of her brothers in the Quaker cemetery on Nine-foot Road in Waterloo, New York.