Reflecting on the origins of the fight for woman suffrage, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention, by Judith Wellman, finds it unsurprising that the movement began in western New York, known as “the burned over district,” a hotbed of religious revivals, abolitionism, feminism, and equal rights.
As Sally McMillen writes in Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Woman’s Rights Movement, the women who led the movement presented such radical ideas as full equality, equal education, access to professional opportunities, and legal recognition. These included Stanton (1815–1902), Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), and Lucretia Mott (1793–1880), who created their own stories to achieve their own agendas in gaining the right to vote, as described in The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898, by Lisa Tetrault.