This Day in History 10.23.09

On this day in 1850, the first meeting of the National Women's Rights Convention was held in Worcester, Massachusetts. 900 people attended.


Speakers Included:
William Lloyd Garrison
Reverend William Henry Channing
Wendell Phillips
Harriot Kezia Hunt
Ernestine Rose
Antoinette Brown
Sojourner Truth
Stephen Symonds Foster and Abby Kelley Foster
Abby H. Price
Lucretia Mott
Frederick Douglass

Lucy Stone spoke last urging for women's property rights.

We want to be something more than the appendages of Society; we want that Woman should be the coequal and help-meet of Man in all the interest and perils and enjoyments of human life. We want that she should attain to the development of her nature and womanhood; we want that when she dies, it may not be written on her gravestone that she was the "relict" of somebody.

Stone paid to have booklets made of the proceedings and called them Woman's Rights Tracts. I can't find a copy of the booklet from the convention of 1850, but I did find a link to download the booklet from 1851 here. Stone did this for the first six conventions and sold them at her lectures.

Positive response in the New York Tribune inspired Susan B. Anthony's involvement in the Women's Rights Movement and a copy of the booklet of the convention inspired Harriet Taylor to write The Enfranchisement of Women the following year in England.