The Journey to Seneca Falls: Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the Legal Emancipation of Women

Abstract

The star that guides us all, President Barack Obama declared in his Second Inaugural, is our commitment to human dignity and justice. This commitment has led us through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall towards the equality that we enjoy today. This Article concerns the pre-history to the Seneca Falls Convention of Women's Rights, alluded to by President Obama. It is a journey that began during the infancy of the common law in medieval England. It leads through the construction, by generations of English lawyers and religious figures, of a strong and imposing monolith of patriarchal rule. By marriage women lost their independent legal personality and were, for purposes of law, incorporated into their husband in accord with the legal doctrine known as coverture. The husband represented the family in civic affairs, was exclusively empowered to make all legally effective decisions for the family, and generally governed his wife and household.This Article is a history of the early phases of the challenge brought against this mode of organizing domestic life. Mary Wollstonecraft, a self-made woman of the eighteenth century, objected to male domination in her books, essays, and works of fiction. She coined the expression rights of women and made a powerful case for the equality of the sexes. In America, her cause was taken up by several generations of campaigners. This Article focuses on three leading nineteenth-century figures — Sarah Grimke, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The Article closes with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and its call for women's suffrage and the abolition of the restrictions of coverture.