Declaration of Sentiments: Women's Grievances Against Men

In this Declaration of Sentiments, Stanton carefully enumerated areas of life where women were treated unjustly. Eighteen was precisely the number of grievances America's revolutionary forefathers had listed in their Declaration of Independence from England.

Stanton's version read, "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 tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world." Then it went into specifics:

• Married women were legally dead in the eyes of the law
  
  
• Women were not allowed to vote
  
  
• Women had to submit to laws when they had no voice in their formation
  
  
• Married women had no property rights
  
  
• Husbands had legal power over and responsibility for their wives to the
   extent that they could imprison or beat them with impunity
  
  
• Divorce and child custody laws favored men, giving no rights to women
  
  
• Women had to pay property taxes although they had no representation 
  in the levying of these taxes
  
  
• Most occupations were closed to women and when women did work they
   were paid only a fraction of what men earned
  
  
• Women were not allowed to enter professions such as medicine or law
  
  
• Women had no means to gain an education since no college or university
   would accept women students
  
  
• With only a few exceptions, women were not allowed to participate in 
  the affairs of the church
  
  
• Women were robbed of their self-confidence and self-respect, and 
  were made totally dependent on men
  

Strong words... Large grievances... And remember: This was just seventy years after the Revolutionary War. Doesn't it seem surprising to you that this unfair treatment of women was the norm in this new, very idealistic democracy? But this Declaration of Sentiments spelled out what was the status quo for European-American women in 1848 America, 
while it was even worse for enslaved Black women.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton's draft continued: "Now, in view of this entire disenfranchisement
 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 these United States."