The Re-Declaration of Sentiments, August 2017
based upon and updated from the Declaration of Sentiments drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony and signed by 68 women and 32 men at the first National’s Woman’s Rights Convention, July 19-20, 1848. 1 It in turn, was based upon the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, July 4, 1776.
Updates and additions to the 1848 Declaration are in italics.
We hold these truths that should be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer. while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled.
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyrranny over her. Although gains have been made, with thanks to 200 years of civil disobedience, fortitude, and articulation by founding mothers before us and the men who supported them, still those old chains of centuries past, continue to pull us down. More than half of the articles in the original declaration of sentiments (from 1848) are true in some form today.
To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world:
That, although women now have suffrage in our nation, still, men compel her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she has no voice.
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly secondary to her husband, even when she is the primary wage-earner.
He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration, still less than her male counterparts in the exact same positions, through means direct and indirect, such as by closing and renaming titles held by men to lesser paid positions when they are held by women. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself.
He allows in many religions, as well as state, but a subordinate position, claiming apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the church.
He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man.
He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.
He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
Women’s history is still considered separate and not equal from our United States history, these contributions, battles, progress made still can be found only in “women’s sections” of our academic institutions, in a fragmented and haphazard way, not in our national archives with the rest of nation’s creation and governance documents
Women still are underrepresented in every branch, party, and level of our United States and state and local government, both in numbers and proportion relative to the population.
Now, in view of this still limited suffrage of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation–in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.
1. Report of the Woman’s Rights Convention, Held at Seneca Falls, New York July 19 and 20, 1848. Rochester: North Star Office, 1848. Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, held by the U.S. Library of Congress. See also Elizabeth Cady Stanton, A History of Woman Suffrage , vol. 1 (Rochester, N.Y.: Fowler and Wells, 1889), pages 70-71. ↩
The Femalist Papers 