July 19th marks 177 years since the Seneca Falls Convention, often celebrated as the beginning of the women’s rights movement in the U.S. It’s undeniably a milestone—but like much of American history, it’s also complicated, incomplete, and exclusive by design. But let’s not forget a truth that too often gets glossed over:
Seneca Falls was a movement for white women’s rights.
The five women credited as its organizers—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Mary M’Clintock, Martha Coffin Wright, and Jane Hunt—were courageous abolitionists and forward-thinkers. But their demand for equality did not include all women. Stanton, in particular, would later openly oppose Black men getting the vote before white women, revealing how easily the ideal of equality was compromised when whiteness felt threatened.
Who Was Left Out—By Design
- Black women were either enslaved or had no recognized citizenship in 1848. The 14th Amendment didn’t come until 1868, and the 19th Amendment was a legal win that meant little without enforcement. Black women still had to fight Jim Crow laws, literacy tests, poll taxes, and outright intimidation—long past 1920.
- Indigenous women belonged to sovereign nations with their own laws, but the U.S. didn’t recognize them as citizens until 1924. Even then, states found workarounds to silence their voices at the polls well into the mid-20th century.
- Latina and Chicana women, especially those affected by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, were promised American citizenship, but got legal obstacles instead. Land theft, racial violence, and civil rights violations were realities they faced for decades.
- Asian women and immigrants—including those of Chinese descent already living and working in California—were legally barred from citizenship and excluded from the rights that come with it. The Chinese Exclusion Act codified racialized gatekeeping into federal law until well into the 20th century.
- Multiracial women were often trapped in restrictive, inconsistent racial categories, subjected to “one-drop” laws that reduced identity to fractions of blood and ancestry. Their lived experiences didn’t fit legal boxes—and that meant their rights didn’t get protected.
Voting Rights: Still Under Attack
Seneca Falls was bold for its time—300 people showed up, debated 11 resolutions, and pushed for women’s suffrage as the most radical demand. Even that made people squirm. Not all attendees supported the resolution for the vote; some walked away.
When women finally secured the right to vote in 1920, let’s not pretend it was a sweeping victory. The 19th Amendment was a door, but it wasn’t open for everyone. For millions of women, it was symbolic—painfully so—because structural racism, voter suppression, and exclusion based on immigration status or tribal affiliation made the ballot box inaccessible.
Asian, Black, Hispanic, Indigenous American, and Multiracial women consistently encountered barriers based on citizenship, residency, and discriminatory laws—even as the legal language claimed to guarantee equality. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally outlawed many practices restricting access to the ballot, but even that’s under attack. The Supreme Court gutted enforcement provisions in 2013 (Shelby County v. Holder), and we’re now seeing new legislation—like the SAVE Act—threaten to once again disenfranchise people under the guise of “election integrity.”
And let’s be real: laws may be written in the language of equality, but implementation is where democracy fails. Racial gerrymandering, ID laws, voter purges, polling station closures—they all scream the same thing: power doesn’t protect itself by playing fair.
So Where Does That Leave Us?
We’re still asking the same questions:
Who is seen? Who is silent? Who is sacrificed?
It shouldn’t take another constitutional amendment for all women to be fully included, empowered, and protected. Yet here we are, still negotiating over basic rights.
Oppression simply evolves. It gets more sophisticated, more insidious, and better at pretending it doesn’t exist. But if we’ve learned anything from the unsteady road since 1848, it’s this: real change doesn’t come from the paper laws are printed on—it comes from people who refuse to settle for cosmetic progress.
Final Thoughts
Seneca Falls lit a spark, but let’s not kid ourselves. That flame burned mostly for white women. If we’re serious about liberation, then we have to name what wasn’t done, who was erased, and whose liberation was always treated as optional.
We don’t need more monuments.
We need more honesty.
And we need more people who are willing to dismantle systems, not just include more people in the margins of them.
At the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race (WISER), we want to challenge, engage, and inspire by confronting history and data head-on, not by diluting their realities. We believe in telling the whole story—even when it’s messy, contradictory, and uncomfortable—because that’s what true progress demands. The history we reflect on is deeply human and full of complexity, and we are committed to using evidence and lived experience to push the conversation forward and hold space for all women.
Lily S. Johnson is a former research assistant. She worked on projects focused on financial well-being and menstrual health.
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Seneca Falls lit a spark, but let’s not kid ourselves. That flame burned mostly for white women. If we’re serious about liberation, then we have to name what wasn’t done, who was erased, and whose liberation was always treated as optional.
We don’t need more monuments.
We need more honesty.
And we need more people who are willing to dismantle systems, not just include more people in the margins of them.
At the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race (WISER), we want to challenge, engage, and inspire by confronting history and data head-on, not by diluting their realities. We believe in telling the whole story—even when it’s messy, contradictory, and uncomfortable—because that’s what true progress demands. The history we reflect on is deeply human and full of complexity, and we are committed to using evidence and lived experience to push the conversation forward and hold space for all women.
Lily S. Johnson is a former research assistant. She worked on projects focused on financial well-being and menstrual health.
