History

2022

July 2023

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Visit https://www.census.gov/history every month for the latest Census History Home Page!

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U.S. Census Bureau History: 1848 Women's Rights Convention

The "Our Roll of Honor" flyer published in honor of the 60th anniversary of the
Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY, reads like a "Who's Who" of the
Women's and Civil Rights Movements.

Included among the signers of the convention's Declaration of Sentiments
are Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Elisha Foote, Frederick Douglass,
and Martha Coffin Wright.

Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

On July 19, 1848, the American Women's Rights and Suffrage Movements took shape at Seneca Falls, NY. Many of the nation's greatest social activists gathered for the 2-day convention to discuss issues related to the role of women in American society. The gathering culminated with the signing and publication of the Declaration of Sentiments. The declaration not only criticized the inequality between men and women in the United States, but also served as the framework for the women's rights movement in the decades to come as women rallied to claim their rights of citizenship and sought equality with men.

American women became increasingly active in the anti-slavery movement in the decades before the outbreak of the Civil War. Lucretia Mott—a Quaker minister—began including anti-slavery messages in her sermons after visiting the slave-owning state of Virginia in 1818. In 1833, Mott helped establish the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. At about the same time, William Lloyd Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society hosted meetings open to both men and women and encouraged all attendees to participate. Both the anti-slavery and temperance movements, which advocated the prohibition of alcohol, drew large crowds of women together. During these meetings, Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Mary Ann M'Clintock began to consider organizing a convention to discuss women's rights and social reform entirely separate from the anti-slavery and Temperance movements.

Planning for a women's rights convention gained momentum after New York's passage of a law protecting women's property rights in the spring of 1848. Lucretia Mott believed the time was ripe to advocate for stronger, nationwide safeguards of women's rights and social reform. During a visit to New York, Mott attended a tea party with Martha Coffin Wright, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Mary Ann M'Clintock at the home of Jane Hunt in Waterloo, NY, on July 9, 1848. The group decided to hold a women's rights convention as soon as possible while they were all still together in Seneca Falls, NY. Two days later, the Seneca County Courier announced a July 19–20, 1848, convention "to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman" at the Seneca Falls Wesleyan Chapel.

In the days leading up to the start of the nation's first women's rights convention, Stanton, Mott, M'Clintock, and others prepared a number of resolutions demanding that women be equal to men at home, school, the workplace, and in religious institutions. Drafted in M'Clintock's parlor, the women used the 1776 Declaration of Independence as a framework for the draft of their Declaration of Sentiments. A second document included a list of specific grievances, including restrictions placed on women based on "coverture" (being under the authority of a husband), denial of the vote, and unequal educational opportunities.

On July 19, 1848, hundreds of women gathered at the Seneca Falls Wesleyan Chapel where Elizabeth Cady Stanton opened the convention by declaring the right of all women "to be free as man is free, to be represented in the government which we are taxed to support, to have such disgraceful laws as give man the power to chastise and imprison his wife, to take the wages which she earns, the property which she inherits, and, in case of separation, the children of her love; laws test against such unjust laws as these that we are assembled today, and to have them, if possible, forever erased from our statute-books, deeming them as a shame and a disgrace to a Christian republic in the nineteenth century." After Lucretia Mott urged attendees to support the new movement, Stanton returned to the podium to read the Declaration of Sentiments and moderate a discussion of revisions. An evening session followed at which men were invited to attend and asked to support the fledgling movement.

Organizers opened the second day's sessions to the public, Elisha Foote, James Mott, Thomas M'Clintock, and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass discussed the Declaration of Sentiments. Douglass' participation drew large crowds as he urged attendees to support women's rights, equality, and vote for in favor the Declaration's resolutions. Most resolutions received unanimous support, but women's suffrage faced opposition. During the second day's speeches, Stanton and Douglass argued that American women must "secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise." Although the 68 women and 32 men who signed the Declaration of Sentiments on July 20, 1848, did not completely support the suffrage resolution, voting rights became the primary objective of the Women's Rights Movement for the next 7 decades until ratification of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution on August 18, 1920.

When the convention adjourned on the evening of July 20, 1848, newspapers expressed mixed reactions to the gathering's demand for women's rights. Some editorials declared that the convention marked the beginning of a new enlightened era. Others, like the Oneida Whig, were much more critical when it questioned, "If our ladies will insist on voting and legislating, where, gentleman, will be our dinners . . .?" Despite such harsh criticisms, women's rights conventions in New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania soon followed. State, county, and local women's rights groups organized to lobby legislatures to grant women equality to men in the voting booth, courts, education, and workplace. In May 1869, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association to coordinate the national campaign to win American women the right to vote. That same year, the territory of Wyoming granted women the right to vote, and in 1870, Eliza Stewart Boyd became the first American woman to serve on a jury in Laramie, WY. Nineteen more states passed women's suffrage laws between 1870 and the August 18, 1920, ratification of the 19th amendment. Since then, women have played an increasingly important role on election day. According to historical reported voting rates data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, more women than men voted in nearly every election since 1980. During the most recent presidential election in 2020, 68.4 percent of registered women cast a ballot versus 65 percent of registered men.

You can learn more about Seneca Falls, NY, and the Women's Suffrage movement using census data and records. For example:

• The Cayuga American Indians lived in the area that would become Seneca Falls, NY. After the American Revolution, the state of New York seized the Cayuga's land (who had allied themselves with the British during the war) and granted it to American military veterans. In July 1790, veterans drew lots to "win" a 600 to 3,000 acre parcel of land (based on rank) within what became known as Central New York Military Tract . The tract encompassed all or portions of present Onondaga, Cortland, Cayuga, Seneca, Oswego, Schuyler, Tompkins, Yates, and Wayne counties.
• The Cayuga Indians are one of the five Iroquois nations that also includes the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca people. The 2020 Census found that 2,572 people identified themselves as members of the Cayuga American Indian tribe and lived in the Cayuga Nation TDSA, NY. Nationwide, the American Community Survey estimated that 8,750,904 people identified as American Indian and Alaska Native alone or in combination with one or more other races in 2021. Learn more about the history of American Indian and Alaska Native census data collection at our American Indians and Alaska Natives webpage.
• Two years after the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, 4,296 people called the town home. The town's population peaked at 9,900 in 1970. As of July 1, 2022, the American Community Survey estimated Seneca Falls, NY, had a population of 8,940.
• Thanks to the water and electric power supplied by the Seneca River, Seneca Falls, NY, became one of the world's largest flour milling centers behind Rochester and Oswego, NY, during the 19th century. Although New York no longer leads the nation for its flour milling industry, the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns series found that the state was still home to 14 flour milling establishments employing 621 people during the pay period that included March 12, 2021. Nationwide, California (28) and Texas (26) had the largest number of flour milling establishments employing 839 and 1,460 people, respectively, during that same pay period in 2021.
• More than a decade before the passage of the 19th amendment, women made up more than one-half of the U.S. Census Bureau's permanent workforce. In addition to working as enumerators, supervising census operations, and tabulating mountains of data, many census workers played important roles in the American Women's Suffrage Movement. Some of these remarkable employees can be found at our Notable Alumni webpage and include:
  • Mary Jane "Jennie" Van Holland Baker worked as an enumerator during the 1880 Census while attending medical school. She later championed women's rights while serving the medical needs of women and children in Brooklyn, NY.
  • Nanie Lancaster tabulated data and published reports during the 1880 and 1890 Censuses. As a freelance journalist, she helped inform women's groups of news related to prohibition, social work, and women's suffrage.
  • During World War I, Mary Church Terrell worked as a census clerk where she helped desegregate the bathrooms closest to her workstation. Outside of the Census Bureau, she organized anti-lynching campaigns, founded the Colored Women's League (later the National Association of Colored Women); became the first African American woman on Washington, DC's school board; was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and was an accomplished author and lecturer on civil rights and women's suffrage.
  • The Census Bureau appointed Julie R. Jenney as one of its first female supervisors in 1919. As a women's suffrage activist, she often spoke to audiences alongside Susan B. Anthony and other prominent women's rights leaders.
  • The connections Stella Goslin Cowan made as a member of her local horticulture, temperance, and women's suffrage groups made her an ideal candidate to become an enumerator during the 1880 Census. In the decades that followed, she served as a delegate to the Utah and National Federation of Women's Clubs' conventions and lobbied for women's suffrage amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
  • Emily Farnum began her Census Bureau career about 1900 and was appointed as one of the agency's first division chiefs in 1919. She was a frequent contributor to the Washington Times on the topic of women's suffrage, participated in suffrage marches, and was an executive member of the Stanton Suffragette Club.
• Prominent anti-slavery and civil rights activists were also participants and vocal supporters of the women's suffrage movement. For example:
• Frederick Douglass was one of the most prominent abolitionists and women's rights advocates of the 19th century. After escaping slavery in 1838, Douglass frequently spoke in favor of women suffrage, and was invited to speak at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention by Elizabeth M'Clintock.
• Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery 1 year after the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. In the decades that followed, she not only made dozens of trips to southern states to lead slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad, but also gave hundreds of speeches in support of women's rights.
• In the decades after her 1826 escape from slavery, Sojourner Truth was a popular abolition and women's rights speaker. Her famous 1851 "Ain't I A Woman" speech delivered at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, OH, demanded equal rights for all women.
• Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and anti-slavery newspaper founder advocated electing women to leadership positions in the abolition movement as early as the 1830s. After the Civil War, he became associate editor of the Women's Journal suffrage newspaper and served as president of both the Massachusetts and American Woman Suffrage Associations.
• Sociologist, civil rights activist, and Census Bureau special agent W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a number of essays in favor of women's suffrage while editing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples' journal Crisis. To promote discussion and a better understanding of the suffrage movement, he also authored essays in opposition to women's voting rights.
• Susan B. Anthony—perhaps one of the most famous women's rights activist—began her life-long commitment to social justice as a teenaged abolitionist. She even assisted Harriet Tubman move fugitive slaves along the Underground Railroad to Canada. In the 1840s, she joined the Daughters of Temperance advocating the prohibition of alcohol. She attended her first National Women's Rights Convention in 1852, and founded the New York Women's State Temperance Society with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1853. In 1866, Anthony, Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Frederick Douglass founded the American Equal Rights Association to advocate for equal rights—particularly the right to vote—for all men and women, regardless of race. In 1878, Anthony and Stanton arranged for senator Aaron A. Sargent to introduce a women's suffrage amendment to Congress that was ratified 42 years later on August 18, 1920..
• Charlotte Woodward Pierce was the only woman who signed the Declaration of Sentiments at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and lived to see the 19th amendment passed on August 18, 1920. Despite her excitement for the amendment's protection of a woman's right to vote, the 90-year-old Pierce was in poor health, bedridden, and unable to vote in the 1920 presidential election pitting Republican Warren G. Harding and Democrat James M. Cox. Although Pierce was unable to make it to the polls, more than 7.6 million more votes were cast in the 1920 election compared to the 1916 Presidential Election between Woodrow Wilson and Charles W. Hughes, immediately suggesting women were a formidable force in American politics.
• Did you know that many cinephiles believe Seneca Falls, NY, was the inspiration for director Frank Capra's fictional town of Bedford Falls in the movie It's A Wonderful Life? Although the movie starring James Stewart, Donna Reed, and Lionel Barrymore is a beloved "classic" today, it was not very popular with the nation's 90 million weekly moviegoers in 1946. Despite poor ticket sales, It's A Wonderful Life still garnered five Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Film Editing, and Best Sound Recording. It won the Technical Achievement Academy Award for its simulation of falling snow developed by the RKO Radio Studio Special Effects Department's Russell M. Shearman, Martin C. Martin, and Jack Lannon.
• Seneca County, NY, is part of the state's Finger Lakes Region, so named for the 11 long, narrow lakes located south of Lake Ontario. The region's natural beauty and abundance of outdoor recreation opportunities has drawn settlers and vacationers since the 18th century. Some of the Finger Lakes Region's notable inhabitants and visitors included: presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Richard Nixon; Secretary of State William Seward; Actors Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis; children's television host Fred Rogers; Twilight Zone writer and producer Rod Serling; journalist and activist Gloria Steinem; authors Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut; Eastman Kodak Company founder George Eastman; aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss; American Red Cross founder Clara Barton; and artist Francis Bicknell Carpenter whose painting "First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln" features the Census Bureau's 1860 Slave Distribution Map.
• A December 28, 1980, act of Congress (Public Law 96-607) established the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls and Waterloo, NY. The park consists of the historic Wesleyan Methodist Church that hosted the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and the homes of prominent women's rights proponents and 1848 convention organizers Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Thomas and Mary Ann M'Clintock, and Jane C. Hunt. In addition to the Women's Rights National Historical Park, Public Law 96-607 also established the James A. Garfield National Historic Site in Mentor, OH, and the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site, in Buffalo, NY. The Garfield site features presidential candidate James Garfield's restored home from which he conducted his "front porch campaign" during the 1880 presidential election. The Roosevelt inaugural site in Buffalo, NY, is home to the Ansley Wilcox house. Following President William McKinley's assassination at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY, vice president Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office at the Wilcox home on September 14, 1901.

Ted Aub's 1998 statue depicts the May 12, 1851, introduction of Women's Rights Activists Susan B. Anthony (left) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (right) by Amelia Jenks Bloomer in
Seneca Falls, NY. The meeting took place as Stanton, Bloomer, and dress reformer Elizabeth Smith Miller walked to an anti-slavery meeting in Seneca Falls. Bloomer and Stanton
are depicted wearing knee-length skirts and pantaloons designed by Miller that were later dubbed "Bloomers" after Amelia Jenks Bloomer.

The statue overlooks the Seneca River near the Women's Rights National Historical Park, Elizabeth Cady Stanton House, and the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Photo courtesy of the New York Department of Economic Development.

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This Month in Census History

Congress established a permanent Census Bureau in March 1902. On July 1, the agency officially opened its doors at the Emery Building located at 1st and B Streets, NW, in Washington, DC, on July 1, 1902.

In 1942, the Census Bureau moved to the newly built "Federal Office Building #3" in Suitland, MD.

Today, we share our Suitland Federal Center headquarters building with the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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Women in the Census

The Census Act of 1879 made decennial census records confidential with severe penalties for disclosing the data they contain. In 1954, Congress codified the rules regulating the confidentiality of census data as Title 13, U.S. Code.

Today, the census schedules collected from each household remain confidential for 72 years after Census Day. Did you know that length of time was initially based on an informal agreement, though?

In 1942, the U.S. Census Bureau completed the transfer of the 1790 to 1870 census records to the National Archives. The records were safe from disaster (like the 1921 fire that destroyed most of the 1890 schedules), preserved, and made available to the public.

The transfer also happened to take place 72 years after the Census Bureau conducted the 1870 Census.

Eight years later, Congress passed the 1950 Federal Records Act. The act opened federal records—including census records—to the public after just 50 years.

Census Bureau director Roy V. Peel believed that given the personal data collected by the census, these records should have a longer period of confidentiality.

Following a series of letters between Peel and Archivist of the United States Wayne Grover, the two agreed to apply the 1870 Census' precedent of 72 years to the release of future census schedules.

In accordance with their agreement, the National Archives made the 1880 records publicly available in 1952 and released the surviving 1890 records in 1962.

Most recently, the National Archives released records from the 1950 Census on April 1, 2022. Future releases are planned every 10 years thereafter, with records from the 2020 Census becoming available in 2092.

Although census records are confidential for 72 years, individuals may request more recent records from the Census Bureau's Age Search Service. This service provides certified records from censuses that are still protected by the 72-year rule to the named person, his or her heirs, or legal representatives.

Individuals can request their records using form BC-600, Application for Search of Census Records (form BC-600sp, Solicitud Para Busqueda De Registros Censales).

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For the Record

The Equal Rights Party nominated Victoria Woodhull as the first female candidate for president of the United States during the 1872 presidential election. The party nominated Frederick Douglass as Woodhull's running mate, but he did not accept the nomination.

Republican Ulysses S. Grant defeated Liberal Republican Horace Greeley to win the 1872 election. The Woodhull–Douglass ticket garnered just 2,000 popular votes.

The Women's Rights Movement also made headlines during the 1872 election when police in Rochester, NY, arrested suffragist Susan B. Anthony after she and 14 other women attempted to vote. Only Anthony went to trial. She was found guilty and fined $100 in December 1872.

The Equal Rights Party nominated Belva A. Lockwood for president and Marietta L. Stow as her running mate in 1884. The ticket received approximately 5,000 votes.

Lockwood was the party's nominee again in 1888. Alfred H. Love declined the vice presidential nomination and was replaced with Charles S. Weld.

More recently, Geraldine Ferraro (1984) and Sarah Palin (2008) unsuccessfully campaigned as vice-presidential nominees. In 2016, Democratic candidate Hillary R. Clinton became the first woman to earn a presidential nomination from one of the nation's major political parties, but lost the election to Republican Donald J. Trump.

In 2020, Kamala Harris became the first woman elected to the office of Vice President of the United States.

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Visit https://www.census.gov/history every month for the latest Census History Home Page!