About this Project

FOUR WAVES OF FEMINISM AND 100 YEARS AGO...

In July of 1848, roughly 300 men and women gathered together at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York with one shared initiative – to fight for women’s suffrage. Under the leadership of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Mary M’Clintock, Martha Coffin Wright, and Jane Hunt, the attendees spent two days discussing women’s rights to jobs, education, property, and politics. These grievances, and many more, were formally aired out in the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. This document, signed by many of these original women’s rights champions, and the resolutions that followed became a rally cry for all women in America that were tired of being perceived as inferior to men.

Although the Seneca Falls Convention was an influential step for the women’s rights movement, females in America were nowhere close to finishing the fight for equality. Months and years following the convention were filled with continuous campaigns, protests, and petitioning for equality, especially in voting rights. It would eventually take 72 more years of fighting for women to gain the right to vote in the United States.

Since that fateful ratification day in August of 1920, the cause has continued to challenge new issues as time has passed and the world has evolved. Education, income, reproductive rights, paid leave, and more issues have risen to the forefront of the movement because, even 100 years later, women still do not see complete equality in the United States and beyond.