The Seneca Falls Convention—often heralded as the first women’s rights convention in the United States—convened on July 19, 1848.
, on view at the National Portrait Gallery now through January 2020.
Surprising everyone, the Tennessee legislature approved the amendment by a one-vote margin. The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was finally ratified on August 18, 1920. Hastily affixing the last star, Paul rushed outside of her headquarters and triumphantly unfurled the flag. As we ponder how to commemorate this 2020 centennial moment, it behooves us to attend to the memories that suffragists themselves handed down. We must interrogate how and why celebrants in 1920 so assuredly placed Anthony at Seneca Falls, even though she had not been there, and why they so confidently used Seneca Falls as the movement’s beginning, when the movement actually had no singular point of departure.
Beginning in the 1870s, Stanton and Anthony first turned Seneca Falls into a story they could use to combat post–Civil War challenges. This fabricated memory helped them consolidate their own deeply contested postwar leadership; set an agenda for a sprawling and to their mind, undisciplined postwar women’s movement; make a pointed and controversial public argument for the necessity of women’s suffrage; and sustain the movement in the face of repeated, often devastating, setbacks.
But stories don’t write themselves. People make stories. And people made this story, well after the event. They made it as a tool in their postwar fight for the vote. And it became a tool that served them well. What we remember, and what we forget, matters. Stanton and Anthony, more than any other suffragists, deployed memory as a weapon in their post–Civil War battle, both inside and outside the movement. But in the end, the story they created, the story of Seneca Falls, may tell us much more about the 1870s and the 1880s than about the 1840s.
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