Stanton co-organized and opened the first women's rights convention in the U.S. at Seneca Falls, New York.
On July 19, 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention opened in Seneca Falls, New York, marking the first women's rights convention held in the United States. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, along with Lucretia Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, Mary Ann M'Clintock, and Jane Hunt, organized the two-day gathering after Stanton and Mott had discussed the idea years earlier at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where women delegates had been excluded from participating.
The convention drew approximately 300 attendees, including both women and men, to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women. Stanton played a central organizing and intellectual role, having drafted the convention's core document, the Declaration of Sentiments, in the preceding weeks.
This gathering is widely recognized by historians, including institutional sources such as the National Park Service and Britannica, as the founding event of the organized American women's rights movement. It established a template for future conventions and provided a public forum where women's grievances—ranging from lack of suffrage to unequal property and custody rights—were formally articulated for the first time in American history.
The convention's legacy endured for over seven decades, directly inspiring the movement that would culminate in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.