Rochester Women's Rights Convention of 1848

Early women's rights activists had to deal with the prevailing belief that a woman was obligated to let her husband or other male relative speak for her in public settings.

Similar tensions were developing within educational institutions, which were just beginning to admit women at higher levels, and within the temperance movement.

[3] The organizers gathered for a preliminary meeting on the day before the convention in Mechanics Protection Hall in Rochester to propose a slate of officers.

Elizabeth McClintock, who was proposed as one of the convention's three secretaries, declined that position because she disagreed with the nomination of a woman as president.

[6] (Mott and Stanton were key organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention, which had conceded to tradition by electing a man as its presiding officer.)

[10] Stanton afterwards apologized for her "foolish conduct" at the Rochester convention in a letter to Amy Post, saying, "My only excuse is that woman has been so little accustomed to act in a public capacity that she does not always know what is due to those around her.

Bush asked the audience to remember that the movement was still in its infancy and to listen with sympathy to speakers who had " trembling frames and faltering tongues.

"[8] Sarah Anthony Burtis, a schoolteacher with experience in making her voice heard, volunteered to read the minutes.

Two African American men, Frederick Douglass and William Cooper Nell, both of whom were ardent abolitionists, spoke in favor of women's rights at the Rochester Convention.

[12] A few men engaged women activists in debate, arguing, for example, that a marriage of equal partners could not possibly work because there would be no one to make the final decision in case of disagreement.

A few years earlier, she said, when the Female Moral Reform Society of Philadelphia asked if they could hold their annual conference in a church, they were given permission to meet only in the basement and only if they agreed that women would not be permitted to speak.

[17] The Rochester Convention was organized primarily by a group of Hicksite Quakers who had resigned from their local congregation in the mid-1840s after it disapproved of their public involvement in anti-slavery activities.

[20] The History of Woman Suffrage, the first volume of which was written in 1881 by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, said the participants in the Seneca Falls Convention knew they had more to discuss, so they "adjourned, to meet in Rochester in two weeks.