Political Quotes

“1848 was one of the busiest years of the 19th Century in Europe. Everywhere kings were abdicating, ministers fleeing, mobs roving. In London, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels composed a pamphlet entitled Manifesto of the Communist Party. Revolution was all the rage. But the real revolution was taking place in a small brick chapel in a village in upstate New York where people had begun to think of a revolution unlike anything known--equal rights for women. The American movement for women's rights began in Waterloo, New York nearly 150 years ago when five women met at the home of Jane and Richard Hunt. There, Elizabeth Cady Stanton of Seneca Falls, Mary Ann McClintock of Waterloo, Marta Coffin Wright of nearby Auburn, Lucretia Coffin Mott of Philadelphia and Mrs. Hunt planned the first women's rights convention held at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls. It was also there that they wrote the ``Declaration of Sentiments,'' a document which can certainly be regarded as the Magna Carta of the women's movement. Modeled on our Declaration of Independence, the ``Declaration of Sentiments'' proclaimed 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. This unprecedented declaration called for broad societal changes aimed at eliminating discriminatory restrictions on women in all their spheres of life.”