Reform movement In the decades leading up to 1848, a small number of women began to push against restrictions imposed upon them by society. A few men aided in this effort. In 1831, Reverend
Charles Grandison Finney began allowing women to pray aloud in gatherings of men and women. The
Second Great Awakening was challenging women's traditional roles in religion. Recalling the era in 1870,
Paulina Wright Davis set Finney's decision as the beginning of the American women's reform movement. A few women began to gain fame as writers and speakers on the subject of abolition. In the 1830s,
Lydia Maria Child wrote to encourage women to write a
will, and
Frances Wright wrote books on women's rights and social reform. The
Grimké sisters published their views against slavery in the late 1830s, and they began speaking to mixed gatherings of men and women for Garrison's
American Anti-Slavery Society, as did
Abby Kelley. Although these women lectured primarily on the evils of slavery, the fact that a woman was speaking in public was itself a noteworthy stand for the cause of women's rights.
Ernestine Rose began lecturing in 1836 to groups of women on the subject of the "Science of Government" which included the enfranchisement of women. and
Lucretia Mott In 1840, at the urging of Garrison and
Wendell Phillips,
Lucretia Coffin Mott and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton traveled with their husbands and a dozen other American male and female abolitionists to
London for the first
World's Anti-Slavery Convention, with the expectation that the motion put forward by Phillips to include women's participation in the convention would be controversial. In London, the proposal was rebuffed after a full day of debate; the women were allowed to listen from the gallery but not allowed to speak or vote. Mott and Stanton became friends in London and on the return voyage and together planned to organize their own convention to further the cause of women's rights, separate from abolition concerns. In 1842
Thomas M'Clintock and his wife Mary Ann became founding members of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society and helped write its constitution. When he moved to Rochester in 1847,
Frederick Douglass joined
Amy and Isaac Post and the M'Clintocks in this Rochester-based chapter of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
Sophia Ripley was one of the participants. In 1843, Fuller published
The Great Lawsuit, asking women to claim themselves as self-dependent. In the 1840s, women in America were reaching out for greater control of their lives. Husbands and fathers directed the lives of women, and many doors were closed to female participation. In the fall of 1841, Elizabeth Cady Stanton gave her first public speech, on the subject of the
Temperance movement, in front of 100 women in Seneca Falls. She wrote to her friend Elizabeth J. Neal that she moved both the audience and herself to tears, saying "I infused into my speech a Homeopathic dose of woman's rights, as I take good care to do in many private conversations." Lucretia Mott met with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Boston in 1842, and discussed again the possibility of a woman's rights convention. They talked once more in 1847, prior to Stanton moving from Boston to Seneca Falls. In March 1848, Garrison, the Motts,
Abby Kelley Foster,
Stephen Symonds Foster and others hosted an Anti-Sabbath meeting in Boston, to work toward the elimination of laws that apply only to Sunday, and to gain for the laborer more time away from toil than just one day of rest per week. Lucretia Mott and two other women were active within the executive committee, and Mott spoke to the assemblage. Lucretia Mott raised questions about the validity of blindly following religious and social tradition.
Political gains On April 7, 1848, in response to a citizen's petition, the
New York State Assembly passed the Married Woman's Property Act, giving women the right to retain the property they brought into a marriage, as well as property they acquired during the marriage. Creditors could not seize a wife's property to pay a husband's debts. which relied on its readers' familiarity with the
United States Declaration of Independence to demand "That all are created free and equal ...", The
General Assembly in Pennsylvania passed a similar married woman's property law a few weeks after New York, one which Lucretia Mott and others had championed. These progressive state laws were seen by American women as a sign of new hope for women's rights. On June 2, 1848, in
Rochester, New York,
Gerrit Smith was nominated as the
Liberty Party's presidential candidate. At the
National Liberty Convention, held June 14–15 in
Buffalo, New York, Smith gave a major address, including in his speech a demand for "universal suffrage in its broadest sense, females as well as males being entitled to vote." The M'Clintocks came to Waterloo from a Quaker community in
Philadelphia. They rented property from Richard P. Hunt, a wealthy Quaker and businessman. The M'Clintock and Hunt families opposed slavery; both participated in the
free produce movement, and their houses served as stations on the
Underground Railroad. Though women Friends had since the 1660s publicly preached, written and led, and traditional Quaker tenets held that men and women were equals, Quaker women met separately from the men to consider and decide a congregation's business. By the 1840s, some
Hicksite Quakers determined to bring women and men together in their business meetings as an expression of their spiritual equality. In June 1848, approximately 200 Hicksites, including the Hunts and the M'Clintocks, formed an even more radical Quaker group, known as the Yearly Meeting of Congregational Friends, or
Progressive Friends. The Progressive Friends intended to further elevate the influence of women in affairs of the faith. They introduced joint business meetings of men and women, giving women an equal voice. == Planning ==