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Declaration of Sentiments
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Background
Rhetorical Context: Similarities to the Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Sentiments is written deliberately in the manner of the US Declaration of Independence, copying its preamble almost word-for-word as well as emulating its general structure. The purpose was to remind readers that though the original Declaration asserted the rights of free men, those liberties and privileges apply to all human beings, including women. The original Declaration, elegantly composed by Thomas Jefferson, might have sounded antique to 19th-century readers, but its words were known and loved by most Americans. The hope was that its style and pacing would rekindle old passions for liberty and fair treatment and redirect them toward a drive to emancipate women.
The Declaration of Sentiments makes specific changes to the older wording. For example: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal” (Paragraph 2) adds “and women” to emphasize that the natural rights claimed in America’s founding document belong to women as well as men.
As in the original Declaration, the middle section devotes itself to a “list of horribles”—listing injustices at the hands of men instead of grievances against a faraway military power—including 16 instances of political, social, and even religious abuse against women.
The Declaration’s riveting reminder of America’s original cry for liberty, and its juxtaposition with the issues women faced, caused a sensation and galvanized the nation’s women.
Philosophical Context: Natural Rights
The idea that people have “natural rights”—rights given to them either by nature or God that are not to be trampled by tyrannical governments—became popular in the 1600s, especially with works on liberty published by British philosopher John Locke. The Founding Fathers knew well those writings, as well as essays by Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and others who argued for freedom from oppression. The Declaration of Independence neatly compresses those arguments within its first few paragraphs in a document that soon inspired people around the world to fight for liberty. (A study guide for Thomas Paine’s Revolutionary War call-to-arms book Common Sense is available at SuperSummary.com.)
Thoughtful women in the United States noticed that those principles were honored only in men’s lives; women lacked political, financial, and social freedom, and instead were forced by law to accept their husbands’ dominance over their lives. Similarly, men unrelated to them held status and command over them.
A small group of women—including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and, later, Susan B. Anthony—organized protests against the double standard that gave men freedom and women servitude. The first of these public dissents took the form of the Declaration of Sentiments, which insisted that the hard-won freedoms enjoyed by American men applied equally to women. It was time, they argued, that the ancient tradition of forcing women to submit to men’s whims ought to be broken and cast aside in a nation founded on liberty.
Socio-Historical Context: Men, Women, and Social Hierarchy
For thousands of years, men and women divided up the work of their villages: Men hunted big game or went off to war, while women nurtured children and managed resources. In most agrarian societies women took second place to men in decision-making. Men’s tasks, physically demanding and often dangerous, contained elements of heroism and the threat of intimidating physical power; thus, women tended to defer to them. By the late Middle Ages in Europe, women were regarded as chattel, mere property, with no human rights beyond those granted by men.
With the coming of the Industrial Age in Europe and America in the early 1800s, this superior-inferior relationship between men and women began to fray. Machines took over many of the hard physical tasks, and fewer daily routines required a strict division of labor as in the past. Societies, however, continued with their old ways. Discerning women noticed the underlying unfairness of these ancient attitudes; American women felt even more keenly the double standard of a country founded on freedom for men but not women.
Adding to this restlessness was the dawning awareness that slavery also violated America’s founding principles, and many women began to see their own lives as forms of slavery. Early women’s rights activists therefore also campaigned for the abolition of slavery. Furthermore, intelligent and well-read women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton chafed against social and legal restrictions that prevented them from, for example, pursuing a career in law or simply studying at college. As the Declaration notes of men and woman, “He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction, which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known” (Paragraph 14).
The time was ripe for protest, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton penned the founding document of a movement fed up with the old oppression. Her group believed that a nation birthed in freedom ought to share the blessings of liberty with all its citizens, not just a privileged few.
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