What was the Declaration of Sentiments?
Based on the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Sentiments was a document that described the types of discrimination women in America faced and offered solutions. It was presented at America’s first women’s rights convention, which began on this date in 1848 in Seneca Falls, NY. Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other suffragettes called for equal rights for women in education, law and voting. (It took another 70-plus years for American women to get the right to vote; the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920.) On this date in 1984 we saw how far women had come when Geraldine Ferraro was chosen as the first female vice-presidential nominee at the Democratic Party convention in San Francisco.
