Development Over Time/Background

(U.S. National Park Service)

This is the Wesleyan Chapel, aka the chapel that the convention was held in. 

For as long as anyone could remember, women had been seen as only mothers and housewives, nothing more. People were very disturbed and surprised when, around the early 1830s, women started speaking out about wanting the same rights as men (“Seneca Falls Convention”).  It wasn’t until Lucretia Mott, Martha C. Wright, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Mary Ann McClintock met up in New York that an idea to help women’s suffrage was revealed (Seneca County Courier). Stanton and Mott were introduced to each other in 1840, where they were attending a convention about abolishing slavery, and they found that the both of them were very aggravated that women were not allowed to talk as a main representative (“Seneca Falls Convention”). Stanton, Mott, Wright, and McClintock all met up at a tea place and that was where the convention was made into a reality, effectively breaking the frontier of women’s rights for being the first ever convention called to discuss women’s rights (Seneca County Courier).​​​​​​​