In honor of Women’s History Month, we highlight Farmington’s role in the early women’s rights movement. We say the names of early women’s rights advocates here to help us remember that individual local action makes a difference for all of us, past and present. 

Through three articles from Yes! Magazine, we also present examples of the diversity of work for women’s rights, highlighting deaf women suffragists, as well as contemporary women of Native and African descent. These stories suggest the impact of work that Americans began in Farmington and elsewhere before the Civil War. 

Today, thousands of Americans visit Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York. The Park commemorates the first women’s rights convention in the U.S., held on July 19-20, 1848. Elizabeth Cady Stanton initiated the idea for this convention, but all the main organizers were Quakers. Just as no woman’s rights convention would have occurred in Seneca Falls in 1848 without Stanton, so it would not have occurred without these egalitarian Friends. Stanton was the catalyst, Friends transformed the idea into action. 

Based on the Declaration of Independence, the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments stated that “all men and women are created equal.” Of the 100 signers of this document, at least twenty-five were Friends. Homes and workplaces for many of these still stand in central New York At least nine signers came from the Farmington-Macedon area: William and Caroline Barker, Eliab W. Capron, Elias and Susan Doty, Catharine Fish Stebbins, Esek and Maria W Wilbur. And Elizabeth D. Smith. Four Friends came with Frederick Douglass from Rochester: Amy Post, Sarah Hallowell, Mary Hallowell, and Catharine Fish Stebbins. All of these were also active in movements for the abolition of slavery. Many worked for Seneca land rights. Several also lived at the Sodus Bay Phalanx, a utopian community that lived in the former Shaker community at Sodus Bay

Several signers came form Seneca County, associated with Junius Monthly Meeting in Waterloo. These included Stephen Shear, of Junius, as well as Thomas Dell, William Dell, Rachel Dell Bonnel, Margaret and Azaliah Schooley, and George and Margaret Pryor, plus four members of the M’Clintock family, or Waterloo. Thomas M’Clintock was Clerk of Genesee Yearly Meeting of Friends at Farmington, 1838-43: Mary Ann M’Clintock and daughters Elizabeth and Mary Ann helped organize the convention. Five members of the extended Hunt family also attended, including Jane Hunt and Richard P. Hunt; Richard’s sisters Hannah Hunt Plant and Lydia Hunt Mount; and Lydia’s daughter Mary Mount Vail. Of all the signers, only Rhoda Palmer, a Quaker from Geneva lived long enough to vote. 

Other Quakers supported the movement immediately after the convention, joining Amy Post, Mary Hallowell, Catharine Fish Stebbins, Elizabeth M’Clintock, and others in helping organize the second women’s rights convention in Rochester, New York, on August 2, 1848. This event attracted many African American abolitionists as well as advocates for working women. In Farmington, Phebe Hathaway wrote to Elizabeth Cady Stanton about inviting Lucy Stone to lecture. Phebe’s brother J.C. Hathaway attended the first national women’s rights convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, with Pliny Sexton, a Quaker from Palmyra. 

Many of these reform-minded Friends left the transnational Genesee Yearly Meeting (Hicksite) when it met in the 1816 Meetinghouse in June 1848. On October 6, 1848, these reformers returned to the 1816 Meetinghouse to organize a new Quaker Yearly Meeting called the Congregational Friends (Later the Progressive Friends and then the Friends of Human Progress). They invited Elizabeth Cady Stanton to give the keynote address at this organizational meeting. 

This inclusive group focused on the “promotion of truth and practical goodness.” They welcomed not only the Quakers but “Chirstians, Jews, Mahammedans, and Pagans, men  and women of all names and no name,” united by the “LAW of LOVE.” Meeting annually until the 1880s at Junius Meeting in Waterloo, they embraced reformers of African as well as European descent (including Frederick Douglass, Charles Lenox Remond, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony). They formed the core of the American Equal Rights Association, arguing for universal suffrage for all citizens, after the civil war. 

When New York State finally recognized the rights of women to vote in 1917 (followed by the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920), many Farmington women, like thousands elsewhere, went for the first time to the polls. As we do the same, we remember their legacy. 

To remind us of the breadth and depth of work for women’s rights, here are three recent articles from Yes! Magazine:

1.  “The Deaf Women Suffragists Left Out of History Books”

1. “5 Indigenous Women Asserting the Modern Matriarchy” highlights five Native women in the West.

1. “Remembering bell hooks, a Revolutionary Who Led with Love,” tells the story of a powerful woman writer who emphasized both the intersectionality of social movements and the love that animates them.

For more information about Farmington and women rights see:: 

1. “Women’s History: Farmington Quaker Meetinghouse,” Video produced by WCNY, the public television station in Syracuse.

2. Ontario County. “Catharine Fish Stebbins,” and Farmington voters in Suffrage-Farmington, Ontario County Historical Society.

3. Wayne County. Judith Wellman, Marjory Allen Perez, with Charles Lenhart and others, Uncovering the Underground Railroad, Abolitionism, and African American Life in Wayne County, New York, 1820-1880 (Lyons: Wayne County Historian’s Office, 2012).

3. Seneca County. Judith Wellman with Tanya Warren, Discovering the Underground Railroad, Abolitionism, and African American Life in Seneca County, New York, 1820-1880 (Waterloo, New York: Seneca County Historian’s Office, 2006).

4. Western New York Suffragists: Winning the Vote, Rochester Regional Library Council

5. Nancy Hewitt, Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds (University of North Caroline Press, 2018).

6. Judith Wellman, Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Women’s Rights Convention (University of Illinois Press, 2004). 

7. Historic Structure Report, 1816 Farmington Quaker Meetinghouse (2017)