Declare Your Sentiments!
The first Women's Rights Convention began on this day in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. At the conference's conclusion, the attendees narrowly approved Elizabeth Cady Stanton's proposal, called the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. The document revised the Declaration of Independence to stress equality for women. This convention and its controversial statements began a seventy-year campaign for national women's suffrage.
This daguerreotype, taken about two years after the convention, shows what the small town of Seneca Falls looked like to the conventioneers.
This view of the Seneca River represents one of the earliest portraits of industrial progress photographed in America. By the mid-nineteenth century the town of Seneca Falls, ideally situated on both banks of the river, had developed as a center of commerce. Cowing & Co., one of America's first manufacturers of fire engines, and Sash & Blind Factory are crowded together on a small island which no longer exists.
Source: Merry A. Foresta and John Wood. Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype (Washington, D.C.: The National Museum of American Art and Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).
Pictured: Unidentified Artist, Seneca Falls, New York (downstream), about 1850, daguerreotype, 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.