On October 5, 6, and 7, 1853, the city of Cleveland played host to the 4th National Women’s Rights Convention. This event – whose 160th anniversary was just last weekend – was attended by luminaries in the Women’s Rights movement: Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, William Lloyd Garrison, and countless more. This was the fourth annual meeting of the Convention, the first having been held in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850.
The movement was not new; Abigail Adams, wife of second U.S. President John Adams, had implored him to “remember the ladies” in 1776, reminding him that “all men would be tyrants if they could.” Yet more than seventy years passed before the movement in the United States truly began to take shape, beginning with the 1848 Seneca Falls, New York, meeting and continuing into the first two decades of the 20th century.
The State Library of Ohio holds in its collection the Report of the 4th National Women’s Rights Convention, now available online, and Ohio Memory hosts a handful of other documents relating to this important movement as well. From finding aids to photographs to political cartoons to our newly-digitized women’s rights convention report, visitors to the Ohio Memory website can get a small glimpse into the effort that ultimately culminated in women obtaining the right to vote with the 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment.
We look forward to sharing more items of interest with researchers. Meanwhile, please explore Ohio Memory to find thousands of treasures like these!
Thank you to Shannon Kupfer, Digital/Tangible Media Cataloger at the State Library of Ohio, for this week’s post!