The Declaration of Sentiments

At Seneca Falls, Stanton took the cadence of the Declaration of Independence and turned it to a new purpose: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. The move was brilliant and exact. By writing the franchise argument in the founding's own voice, she held the country to its stated word and made the demand for women's rights sound like what it was, the unfinished business of 1776. The vote came seventy-two years later. The argument was already complete.

The principal author of the Declaration of Sentiments and the intellectual engine of the early women's rights movement. At Seneca Falls in 1848 she took the cadence of the Declaration of Independence and turned it to a new purpose, holding the founding promise to account by writing in its own voice. She argued for the vote decades before it came, and did not live to see it. The argument was hers; the victory belonged to those who outlived her.