Rochester Women's Rights Convention of 1848

The Rochester Women's Rights Convention of 1848 met on August 2, 1848 in Rochester, New York. Many of its organizers had participated in the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention, two weeks earlier in Seneca Falls, a smaller town not far away. The Rochester convention elected a woman, Abigail Bush, as its presiding officer, making it the first public meeting composed of both men and women in the U.S. to do so. This controversial step was opposed even by some of the meeting's leading participants. The convention approved the Declaration of Sentiments that had first been introduced at the Seneca Falls Convention, including the controversial call for women's right to vote. It also discussed the rights of working women and took steps that led to the formation of a local organization to support those rights.

Many of the organizers of the convention were part of a group of Quaker dissidents who had begun to associate with the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, the site of the convention. This group included the family of Daniel and Lucy Anthony, whose daughter, Susan B. Anthony, later became the most prominent national leader of the women's suffrage movement.

Early women's rights activists had to deal with the prevailing belief that a woman was obligated to let her husband or other male relative speak for her in public settings. There was bitter opposition to the idea of women voicing their opinions to "promiscuous audiences," the name that was given to audiences that contained both men and women. In 1837, the Congregational Church of Massachusetts, a major force in that state, issued a pastoral letter to be read in every congregation that sharply criticized this practice, claiming it would "threaten the female character with wide-spread and permanent injury."

Despite the hostility, a small but growing number of women insisted on speaking out, especially in opposition to slavery. Some male abolitionists encouraged this practice while others refused to accept it. Disputes about the role of women began to disrupt the abolitionist movement, contributing to a split at a convention in 1840. Similar tensions were developing within educational institutions, which were just beginning to admit women at higher levels, and within the temperance movement. Concerned women activists in western New York organized the first women's rights convention, the Seneca Falls Convention, to discuss the rights of women on July 19–20, 1848 in the village of Seneca Falls. They called for similar conventions to be organized around the country.

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