A Brief Description

Elizabeth Cady Stanton read the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions to the Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York in July of 1848. The text is designed to parallel an earlier declaration penned in 1776: The Declaration of Independence. The Sentiments and Resolutions provides a list of injuries—15 in total—that men have perpetrated on women. It then offers a series of 12 resolutions, the implementation of which would help to eliminate the “absolute tyranny” of men over women. The enumeration of the injuries produces an overwhelming effect on the reader. As the accumulation of offenses are stacked on one another, line by line, those offense also come to weigh heavily on the reader’s mind. The list of resolutions produces a similar effect, in which the weight of the work required to correct the injustices weighs heavier and heavier as each resolution is read.

Much like the text it imitates, the tone of the Sentiments and Resolutions is strident and sweeping. However, though the Sentiment’s most obvious characteristic is its similarity to the Declaration of Independence, its most striking characteristic is the manner in which it departs from its precursor—a departure that can be read as a critical failure. This failure functions to expose the failures of the Declaration of Independence. Namely, that by excluding women, the Declaration did not stand up to its own declared principles. Evidence of this omission appears quickly in the document, beginning in the second sentence. Where the Declaration posits “that all men are created equal,” the Sentiments and Resolutions declares “that all men and women are created equal.” This maneuver exposes the word men as a non-inclusive term. By placing the word women next to men, the document draws attention to the exclusivity of men (both the Declaration’s writers and those honored with its rights), as well as the Declaration’s own failure to extend equal protection to all people in the United States.