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Portrait of Susan B. Anthony superimposed over the 1876 "Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States" document.

▪ An original copy of the Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States, passed out by Susan B. Anthony (shown above) during a centennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. Manuscript Division, Prints and Photographs Division

A Declaration for Women

From Seneca Falls to the centennial, women claimed the promise of 1776.

The Declaration of Independence inspired many American women to demand their rights.

The most famous instance is likely the nation’s first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. At this meeting of over 300 persons, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton read her now-famous “Declaration of Sentiments” protesting women’s inferior legal status and listing 11 resolutions for the moral, economic and political equality of women, the most radical of which demanded “the elective franchise.”

Fast forward to 1876, when the nation celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with the Centennial Exposition, a massive world’s fair held in Philadelphia that drew nearly 10 million visitors for an exuberant six-month celebration of American progress and patriotism.

The fair’s patriotic symbolism culminated on July 4, 1876, with a staged reading of the Declaration of Independence by a descendant of signer Richard Henry Lee, held in front of Independence Hall.

Members of the National Woman Suffrage Association, however, disrupted the event by pushing their way to the platform to give Susan B. Anthony the opportunity to present a “Declaration of Rights” for women to Thomas W. Ferry, acting vice president of the United States. Hurrying from the building, the women distributed copies of the document to the assembled body.

Safely outside, a crowd gathered, and Anthony read the women’s demands, which included equality for all individuals.

Meanwhile, a stirring painting by Archibald M. Willard, titled “The Spirit of ’76” (better known simply as “Yankee Doodle”), created especially for the Centennial Exposition, captured the imagination of the fair’s visitors (see page 19). As they did with the stirring language of the Declaration of Independence, women’s rights activists appropriated the painting’s visual power for their own ends.

More than 40 years after the 1876 Centennial Exposition, the women’s suffrage movement continued to take inspiration from the Declaration of Independence and Willard’s painting in publications and postcards, tying the movement for women’s voting rights and equality to the rights of representation sought by the nation’s founding generation.

—Elizabeth A. Novara is a historian in the Manuscript Division.

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