Seneca Falls First Woman’s Rights Convention of 1848: The Sacred Rites of the Nation

Abstract

This article explores parallels between the Seneca Fails First Woman’s Rights Convention of July, 1848, and the Badasht Conference, held in Persia that same month. In the former event, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was to become a leader in the women’s suffrage movement for the remainder of the century, was supported by Frederick Douglass, a noted abolitionist and radical newspaper publisher. In the latter event, a conference of the emerging Bábí Faith. Táhirih, an enlightened woman, also introduced the revolutionary feminine in collaboration with a significant man, Quddús. The independence and equality of women is a fundamental precept of the Bahá’í Faith, which is the culmination of the Bábí movement. The comparison is set in a broad frame of reference in which individuals today might face their own coming of age in social, sexual, and racial terms.