Abolitionism and the Antebellum U.S. Women’s Rights Movement: The (Missed) Connections of the First National Woman’s Rights Convention (1850)

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Although it has been overshadowed by the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the First National Woman’s Rights Convention that took place in Worcester, Massachusetts on October 23-24, 1850, was an important event for the antebellum fight for women’s rights in the United States. While it relied on skills and resources that originated in abolitionism, it also showed that activists were starting to develop a women’s rights discourse that included woman suffrage. Unlike what happened at Seneca Falls, a Black woman, Sojourner Truth, addressed the convention, which points to the possibility of a truly inclusive movement. The constant use of the slavery metaphor as well as the way Truth’s presence was framed throughout the meeting, however, anticipated the divisions of U.S. feminism and Black women’s exclusion from the movement after the Civil War.