Seneca Falls

Well, I, I would say, in my-- I argue in my book that although there are reasonable feminists and have been throughout history, there was never a reasonable moderate feminism that wasn't in some way mar-- uh, warped by, um, anti-male animus, uh, that wasn't warped by envy and resentment and undergirded by this conviction of female moral superiority.

So for example, if you go way back to the very beginning, eighteen forty-eight, the first Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in New York, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leader of the American women's movement, uh, wrote a, um, declaration of, of women's rights and, and, and women's demands.

And she claimed in that declaration, um, which was called the Declaration of Sentiments, it was modeled on the, um, the American, uh, Declaration of Independence.

She claimed that the whole history of humankind was the history of, um, repeated injury and usurpation on the part of man against woman, having as its direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.

Um, but I can't remember which war it was.

'Cause he was in Seneca Falls, a half an hour away from me, and had no idea he was that close to me.

Oh, wow.

[laughs] So-

The suffrage movement was extremely fragmented.

There was a first wave of suffrage, exemplified by the women at Seneca Falls, and this metamorphosed into the National American Women's Suffrage Association, or NAWSA.

Most of the leadership of NAWSA was made up of middle- to upper-class women, often involved in other progressive causes, who unfortunately sometimes represented the darker side of the suffrage movement.

Because these upper-class progressives frequently used nativist arguments to make their claims for the right to vote.

Not long ago, General Eisenhower said these words, We not only need to educate fully the people of the highest mental capacity, but we must all of us have a sharper understanding of how we are to exercise the rights of citizenship and to discharge its duties.

General Eisenhower said this, as a matter of fact, at groundbreaking ceremonies in the college named in his honor Eisenhower College at Seneca Falls, New York.

General Eisenhower's words bear out a basic concept of the new college, and that is that 90% of the nation's high school students will never be in the top 10% of their graduating classes.

that 90% of the consideration should not be given, as it is in too many colleges, to the 10%.

Ho Chi Minh quoted Thomas Jefferson in 1945.

The women's movement, Seneca Falls, the abolitionist movement, the anti-slavery movement, right? Martin Luther King Jr.

And you were talking about before about, you know, seeing the person you disagree with, not just as a fellow citizen who you disagree with, but as an enemy.

That sounds like the 1790s.

All men are created equal.

Seneca Falls in 1848.

The women there did not write a new philosophy.

They took the Declaration of Independence and rewrote it clause by clause, structure intact, substituting one tyranny for another, and then let the original's own logic do the indictment.