Honeymooning in London, Elizabeth Candy Stanton decided to sit in on an anti-slavery convention, only to be told that women were not allowed. Stanton found a fellow female outcast in Lucretia Mott, the Quaker minister, feminist, and abolitionist. The two struck up a friendship over their shared belief in the equality of women. Eight years later, during a chance meeting in New York, the two women were joined by several other prominent women’s rights activists, and decided to make a convention of their own — this one about the status of women. It would be held in Stanton’s hometown of Seneca Falls, New York.

On this day, July 19, in 1848 at the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Seneca Falls, a group of about 260 women and 40 men gathered to hear out Stanton’s eleven resolutions. Modeled closely on the Declaration of Independence, Stanton’s decree held that “all men and women are created equal”, and listed eighteen grievances — the same number as the American colonists submitted against King George IV — held by women against men.

Among the most debated of her resolutions was that of women’s suffrage. The small number of Quaker women in the audience endorsed the idea, as their husbands typically refused to vote, but everyone else thought the idea very strange. The resolution still passed, as did all the others, with the held of Frederick Douglass, an informal speaker at the Seneca Falls convention.