Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca Falls

Elizabeth Cady Stanton read this declaration at the convention in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19, 1848. She built it on the shape of the Declaration of Independence so that the demand for equal rights would sound familiar to any reader. About three hundred people came, and one hundred signed the document, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men. Frederick Douglass spoke in support of the resolution on the vote.

Where this text comes fromThe echo does not stop at the opening. The document goes on to list grievances one after another, in the same form and roughly the same number as the list of complaints against the king in 1776, so the whole text is a sustained parody in the old sense of the word: the shape is borrowed exactly, and the substitution of one subject for another is the argument. The page linked below carries the declaration on its own, separated from the convention proceedings it was read into.

What you might not noticeThe two texts diverge at once, on the punctuation right after self-evident, and then on the fourth word. The Declaration of Independence prints a colon there and this one prints a semicolon, which flattens the pause and lets the clauses run on as a single list. Source

What it trainsFour semicolons and three commas in 337 characters, with only one full stop at the end, so the whole passage is a single sentence that keeps adding clauses without ever letting you stop. The semicolon arrives four times, which no other founding text on this shelf matches, and on the US layout it needs no Shift at all, which is exactly why it slips past unnoticed when you are reading ahead. Two capitals in the entire fragment. If you have already typed the Declaration of Independence on this site, the muscle memory will work against you: the words run almost the same for the first eight, then diverge, and the hand tends to finish the sentence it learned first.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource