Introduction, The Sesquicentennial of the 1848 Seneca Falls Women\u27s Rights Convention: American Women\u27s Unfinished Quest for Legal, Economic, Political, and Social Equality

On July 19, 1998, America celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention. Almost three hundred women and men including Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frederick Douglass met on that July date in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, for a two-day discussion of the social, civil and religious rights of woman. At the conclusion of the meeting, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed their names to a Declaration of Sentiments and this country\u27s organized women\u27s rights movement began. The Declaration of Sentiments was the earliest, systematic, public articulation in the United States of the ideas that fuel the quest for women\u27s economic, political, social, and legal equality to this day. In recognition of the enduring importance of this conference to women qua women, a group of researchers at the University of Kentucky came together to discuss an appropriate and meaningful way to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the Seneca Falls Conference. As direct beneficiaries of the women\u27s rights movement, these researchers wanted to make their own contribution to that centuries long struggle. They decided to create a symposium issue for the Kentucky Law Journal that examines contemporary aspects of problems that were first identified in the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments