Women’s Rights National Historical Park invites visitors for Convention Days 2024, to be held in Seneca Falls, July 19 through 21. Convention Days, long a signature event in Seneca Falls, commemorates the anniversary of the 1848 women’s rights convention, where 300 women and men joined together in asserting that “all men and women are created equal.” The convention was the first of its kind in the United States and gave rise to the American women’s rights movement. The theme of Convention Days 2024 is Revolutionary Families, which will focus on the shifting role of the family throughout American history. Convention Days will include family programming, as well as presentations by historians, park staff, and living history performers focusing on the topic of family.
In the nineteenth century, women’s lives were legally and socially defined by their families. Unmarried women were under the influence of their fathers, while married women were considered the property of their husbands. Women’s autonomy existed only when permitted by the men in their families. Mothers’ lives were dictated by the needs of their children, and children’s rights extended no farther than their mothers.’ Fathers were also limited by societal expectations that they support their families rather than being caretakers.
Of the five convention organizers, all were wives and mothers, daughters and sisters, sisters-in-law, friends, and neighbors. Their roles in their families were intrinsically connected with their roles in society at large. Their own revolutionary families formed the basis for their activism; from Elizabeth Cady Stanton eliminating the word “obey” from her wedding vows, to the Coffin sisters’ (Martha Wright and Lucretia Mott) abolitionist Quaker upbringing.
Today, gender and family remain intrinsically connected. Convention Days 2024: Revolutionary Families will focus on the ways family influenced the 1848 women’s rights convention and the early women’s rights movement, as well as the ways in which the definitions of family have changed and continue to impact human rights to this day.
For more information, visit https://www.nps.gov/wori/planyourvisit/convention-days-2024.htm or contact the park at 315-568-0024 or e-mail http://www.WORI_information _desk@nps.gov.
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