Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm colleague. I'm Tracy me Wilson, So Tracy October. In October, we had kind of an interesting connection made we did. The Office of the Chief Technology Officer of the United States, that's Megan Smith, reached out to our podcast about a piece of history that has actually gone missing and kind of was interested in seeing if we wanted to talk about this piece of history and maybe collaborate a little bit, And of course we said yeah, yeah, Well, my favorite part of this was that we got we got the ping on Twitter and you texted me about it within minutes while I was sitting on my couch doing nothing, and You're like, hey, listen to this excitement. It's cool. So of course we wanted to collaborate with Megan and her team and help raise some awareness. And what really got me excited is that, uh, there is also a call to rally our listeners to help this little problem. And we're gonna tell you more about how you can get involved at the end of the episode. But first, what we're actually going to talk about today is the very early stages of the women's rights movement in the United States. Yeah, we are coincidentally on a suffrage series, driven in part by this visit that Holly made to the White House. Uh and in my case the much more boring explanation of when the library books showed up from inter library loan. That's still very valid though. So we're gonna cover today a little bit of biographical information about a couple of the key players Germaine to this particular slice of that history that we're focusing on, and then we're going to talk about the First Women's Rights Convention, and we'll also discuss this document that was written for the event, called the Declaration of Sentiments, and we'll hear from the U s c t o Megan Smith, who I referenced a moment ago about what happened to that document. So we're going to start by talking a little bit about Lucretia Mott and she was born Lucretia Coffin in Nantucket, Massachusetts, on January third of sevent She had seven siblings. When she was thirteen, Lucretia went to a Quaker boarding school in New York State called Nine Partners, and she actually stayed there for a long time of her life. She stayed there after she finished her studies as a teaching assistant. When she graduated, Lucretia often attended lectures by speakers who visited the school, and it was through this these events that she became aware of the plight of enslaved Africans and also the abolitionist movement. She also learned while at the school that the women teachers were earning less money than the men who talked there. And as she learned more and more about the various injustices of the society that she was living in, she became more and more resolved to do something about it. So Mott became a well known anti slavery speaker and the Acre Minister by the eighteen twenties, and Lucretia had met the man who had become her husband, James Mott, while she was working at the Quaker school. The pair married in eighteen eleven, and they set up their household in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. James and Lucretia had six children, though one of them died in childhood, and there's not a ton of like when you look at her biographical info, they don't really list out the kids in their ages as often as happens with some of the other women in this movement, but we did know that she had six They did not all survive uh Five of them, though, did live into adulthood. In eighteen thirty three, Mott was a pivotal member of the group of women who organized the Philadelphia Female Anti Slavery Society. Her work there cemented her place as an abolitionist leader, and in eighteen forties she traveled to London to serve as a delegate from the Philadelphia Female Anti Slavery Society to the World Anti Slavery Convention. And now we're gonna shift gears for a moment and talking out Elizabeth Katie Stanton. I have also heard it pronounced Elizabeth Cady Stanton. I don't know which is correct. I watched a ton of videos and I mostly heard Katie, but I also heard Catty in a couple of places. So my apologies first if that rankles anybody one way or the other. But we're gonna go with Katie that just because that's the way I always heard it growing up, and it's more natural. Elizabeth Katie was born in Johnstown, New York, on November twelfth of eighteen fifteen. Her mother was Margaret Livingstone Katie and her father, Daniel Katie, was a lawyer, a judge, and a speculator. And he was also a man who, if he had his brothers, would have had only sons, and that was something that he never really made any effort to hide. Although she was not a male child, Elizabeth was educated as one, and it she made it her habit to work really hard to shine in areas of study that had traditionally been associated with boys rather than girls. She attended a local boys school in Johnstown and studied Latin, Greek religion and sciences right along side her male counterparts, off and outperforming them academically. Despite her excellent academic records, she could not attend the same college as the young men in her graduating class, simply because she was a woman, and so she enrolled in the Troy Female Seminary in New York. She graduated from that school in eighteen thirty two at the age of seventeen. When Elizabeth met Henry Brewster Stanton at her cousin Garrett Smith's home in Peterborough, New York, Stanton was already deeply involved in the abolition movement. Their romance was not appreciated by Elizabeth's father. He was a Federalist just the same and against her family's wishes. Elizabeth and Henry were married on May first, eighteen forty. Famously, Elizabeth had the phrase to obey omitted from the traditional list of promises a bride makes to her husband in the course of the marriage ceremony. Yeah, that one always strikes me. I've read it before and even reading it doing re hurch for this episode, because I've known brides in the recent past who have still had to make it clear to the efficients at their ceremonies that the obey language had to be dropped. We actually just met with our efficient on this past weekend, uh, and the two things we said, really, we don't want to write our own vows. We I'm also not saying anything about obeying and that, I mean, it was not necessary for me to say that for our efficient in particular, she comes from a very progressive denomination. Uh. But she said that she has had people who have specifically asked her to have that in there. I mean, whatever, whatever you want to do, it's choice to do it. But I was like, really, when my best friend got married, and this is a long time ago. She and I got married very close to each other in time period. She her efficient at the last minute had to step out. I don't remember the circumstances, but they luckily had another person that was like a friend of one of her parents coworkers, that was able to do it. And he was very sweet. But she had made very clear that she would not be saying obey and all he did was substitute out the words served like he didn't understake dear, but he was. He was so sweet that there was this beautiful, awkward moment in the middle of the ceremony where we all just went, What's what's she gonna do? But she was. She just kind of laughed and said it and kept going. But it was It's very funny. But it strikes me as odd that this was something that people were thinking about in the eighteen forties, and yet still in the twentie and twenty first century, people are still having these discussions and it is not always clear why that sentiment would not want to be there, But there you go. Uh So. For their honeymoon, though the newlywed Stantons went to the World Anti Slavery Convention in London, that same one that Lucretia Mott was going to. Henry represented the American Anti Slavery Society as a delegate, but there was a problem when they arrived because women attendees were initially not granted entry into the event because they were not men. This led to a lengthy and heated discussion of the matter among the delegates, and eventually women were given access, but they had to sit in the back of the hall, and they weren't allowed to participate in any way. They were only granted access to observe. And so in eighteen forty Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Katy Stanton met for the first time at the World Anti Slavery Convention in London in this newly designated women's section, and both of them were quite serious about it. They made fast friends in their mutual indignation over this situation, and they agreed that once they had returned to the US, they should set up a women's convention as soon as possible. The goal of that gathering was going to be discussion about the injustices that women were constantly suffering, similar to the ones they had just gone through. At this convention that was supposed to be about equality and progressive thinking. Well, and I feel like this is a good point or a good moment to point out that even though this was running in a lot of ways in parallel with the abolition movement, and there are a lot of overlap and characters there, at the same time, it's a very valid criticism that some of the same short sightedness was affecting the women who were leading this movement. It was in a lot of ways focused mostly on educated, middle class and never class white women, when there were actually a lot more women in the United States than just them. Yes, absolutely so. After the convention in London concluded, the Stantons came back to the Nine States and they lived for a little while in Johnstown. Henry studied law with Elizabeth's father until he passed the bar, and then the two of them moved to Albany, New York, and then to Boston, Massachusetts. For a while, Henry practiced law and he and Elizabeth grew their family. They had a son named Daniel Katie Stanton in eighteen forty two, and then two years later they had another boy, Henry Brewster Stanton Jr. In eighteen forty five, Garrett Smith Stanton was born, and Henry and Elizabeth would eventually have four more children, yet Our World Stanton in eighteen fifty one, Margaret Livingstone Stanton in eighteen fifty two, Harriet Eaton Stanton in eighteen fifty six, and Robert Livingstone Stanton in eighteen fifty nine. And I wanted to make a brief aside that one of the reasons that Henry agreed to go study law under Elizabeth's father was kind of like to acquiesce a little bit and be like, Hey, I know you don't always like my politics, but I do want to be a good son in law, and I do want to support your daughter and you know, give her a good life. And so he kind of agreed to study law along those lines. And also it was, you know, a good way to make a living. But in eighteen forty seven, Henry's health was really suffering, and so the decision was made that they were going to move to Seneca Falls, New York, in the hopes that a change in environment would revive him a little bit. And Elizabeth's father owned a house there at thirty two Washington Street, and he transferred that house and the property it was attached to over to his daughter. He basically gave them this new home to live in. This change of scenery was really difficult for Elizabeth. She didn't have her network of friends and fellow activists anymore, and her life was really paired down to just taking care of the kids she and Henry had seven, and also in managing housework. To Elizabeth, this was not a life she could sustain with any sort of happiness. She wrote of this time, quote, my duties were too numerous and buried, and not sufficiently exhilarating or intellectual to bring into play my higher faculties. I suffered with mental hunger, which, like an empty stomach, is very depressing. On July nine, Elizabeth Katie Stanton was at a gathering at the home of Jane and Richard Hunt in Waterloo, and also at that same gathering this was it's often characterized as a tea but the ladies were really there for the majority of the day was Lucretia Mott, Mary Anne McClintock, Martha Wright, and of course Jane Hunt, the lady of the house, and Elizabeth had grown increasingly frustrated with the restrictions of a woman's role at the time, and she was hearing this chagrin with her friends and really kind of complaining about feeling very trapped and and very just frustrated it at the life she was forced into. And all of the women they're really shared in the same experience. They all had been working on the issue of abolition and temperance, and they all had families, and they all had experienced discrimination. So this was definitely like a preaching to the choir situation. As the women discussed the problem of how to address their frustrations and always being placed below men, they had the idea of a women's convention, which had first been agreed upon between mont Mott and Stanton eight years earlier. This really gained the center stage and their conversation. They decided they would call it a women's rights Convention, and the ball was soon rolling and the first Women's Rights Convention was scheduled for a mere ten days later. It was my mind that it was only ten days between having the idea and scheduling the thing, Like we live in a world where we are scheduling events that are happening and mark and we're recording this in November. Yeah, it's uh, it's very uh, fascinating but also exciting. I can't I would be terrified to put an event together. But before we get into the convention and kind of how they got everyone informed that it was even happening. We're gonna pause for a word from one of our fabulous sponsors. This is timely. 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Just buy in print official US postage using your own computer and printer. It's so much easier. You can print postage for any letter package right when you need it, and then you just hand that off to your friendly mail carrier and it is easy and convenient. Right now, you can use our special promo code, which is STUFF, so that when you go to stamps dot com, you will get a special offer giving you a four week trial plus one dollar bonus offer that's going to include some postage as well as a digital scale. So don't wait. Go to stamps dot com and before you do anything else, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in stuff that's stamps dot com and enter stuff. On July, the following announcement ran in the Seneca County Career Women's Rights Convention. At convention to discuss the social, civil, religious condition and rights of women will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel at Seneca Falls, New York, on Wednesday and Thursday of July. Current commencing at ten o'clock am. During the first day, the meeting will be exclusively for women, which are which all are earnestly invited to attend. The public generally are invited to be present on the second day, when Lucretia Mott of Philadelphia and others both ladies and gentlemen, will address the convention. So remember that at this point Lucretia Mott really did have a fairly significant uh name as being a really amazing orator, so it made sense that she was the one that they picked kind of include in their their call to action copy. And this same copy ran in multiple places starting on July eleven and running for several days, including Frederick Douglas's paper The North Star. Douglas was also invited to the convention by Elizabeth McClintock, and that was an invitation to which he replied, quote to be sure, I will do myself the pleasure or of accepting your kind invitation to attend the proposed Women's Convention at Seneca Falls. In addition to the announcement in the papers, the ladies mobilized their connections with an abolitionist and social reform communities to try to spread the word, and in the day's leading up to the event, Elizabeth Katie Stanton drafted a document modeled on the Declaration of Independence calling for women's rights. It was called the Declaration of Sentiments, and it outlined the ways in which women had been treated unjustly and called for an organized movement to reclaim rights. The Declaration of Sentiments included eighteen injuries and usurpations to women. They're also eleven resolutions to accompany the declaration. And so when July nine arrived two hundred or three hundred, depending on the source you read, people convened at the Wesleyan Chapel. Lucretia Mott's husband, James, presided over the meeting. Mary McClintock was appointed secretary of the meeting, and Elizabeth Katie Stanton stated the purpose of the meeting, and then Lucretia Mott made opening remarks. Stanton read the Declaration of Sentiments, and then, after a proposition was introduced to do so, it was read again, section by section, with discussion after each piece. In some cases changes were made to it based on that discussion. The attendants then had further lively discussion about whether men should sign the declaration as well as women, and while eventually the group did vote in favor of this idea, the final decision was actually tabled for the following day since the men would be there at that time, and so the morning session at this point was adjourned until the afternoon. When the group reassembled for the second half of the day, the amended version of the Declaration of Sentiments was read. The document was approved by vote and then circulated for signatures, and then the eleven resolutions were read. The ninth of these was the most controversial. It called for voting rights for women, and while all of the other resolutions passed unanimously on the second day of the convention, this one really met with some resistance. It was simply too radical for some of the women there, but others passionately asserted the need for it, and eventually it did pass with a majority, but not with unanimity. One of the things that is interesting to me about that is that we're not quite sure what order these episodes are going to come out in, but this episode and our Katherine Dexter McCormick episode are are happening near one another. Uh, and so during this episode, the idea of women women voting was a little too radical, And then we move ahead in time a little bit with Katherine Dexter McCormick, and at that point voting was what pretty much all the women's rights activists were all on board for. Contraception had become the thing that was too radical. Yeah, it's always interesting to see how, uh, you know, movements shift in what what is initially thought of as as really like too far, we're going too far with this and kind of garners some negative attention eventually gets superseded by something else, and it's just a fascinating kind of ebb and flow to watch. Yeah, so if either remember that Catherine Dexter McCormick episode you've already heard, or look forward to it, depending on how we eventually run the Also amid all these speeches on the second day was an address by Frederick Douglas supporting the women's cause. By the time they convention had closed, sixty eight women and thirty two men had signed the Declaration of Sentiments, And of course this event made waves. The press kind of skewered the effort, and many less enlightened folks kind of preach the danger of letting women achieve equality. In reaction to all of this, fewer Frederick Douglas wrote, quote, a discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with far more complacency by many of what are called the wise and good of our land than would be a discussion of the rights of women. So frustrated because it's the same situation Asian today, not just for women, for women, for people of color, Like there are a lot of we're having the same conversations so much later anyway. Uh. At the same time, the first Women's Rights Convention had just happened, and regardless of how it was received by the public, and because of the outrage, the declaration of Sentiments gained a lot of attention that it might not have received otherwise. Yeah, there was one right up that I was reading that was suggesting that Elizabeth Katie Stanton was kind of an early adopter. Without this exact phrase of like, you know, no press is bad press, she was like, well, they're they're talking about it in all the papers, so more and more women are going to hear about this, so I guess it's not all that bad. Uh. I do want to take a moment and talk a little bit about how history is sometimes framed. Because there's been a lot of discussion, particularly around this convention and the sentiments in the beginning of the women's rights movement in the last year or so. One thing I want to point out is that sometimes you will hear people loopens Susan B. Anthony is having been present for this convention. She was not. That information is not correct. While she and Elizabeth Katie Stanton would work closely together in the fight for women's rights in the eighteen fifties and beyond, they actually had not even met in eighteen forty eight. They didn't meet until eighteen fifty one. So she sometimes kind of gets backwards engineered into it, but she wasn't actually there. In herteen book The Myth of Seneca Falls, author Lisa to troll asserts that in some ways the importance of the Seneca Falls Convention was kind of backwards engineered by women's rights activists when the movement reformed after it paused during the Civil War, and to Trolle's book really suggests that both Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Susan B. Anthony kind of leveraged information about the Seneca Falls Convention to achieve two ends, and she makes it clear that it's not fabrication, but the way they framed it really kind of sets up these two things. One, they used it to dismiss the American Women's Suffrage Association by indicating that they had they, meaning Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, had been much more a part of the start of the movement, and that validated their group, which was the National Women's Suffrage Association, over that competing group. And to that it cemented their own positions and influence within the women's movement to kind of indicate that they had been there from the beginning. This is another reason why it's really cool that we're coincidentally doing this episode and one on Katherine Dexter McCormick at the same time, because you can see ahead in time a little bit continuing disputes between different organizations working towards the same ends, which is the case and a lot of social movements, but like that did not go away with these particular groups. Yeah. So, because this is still a really new book and it's a great new take on women's history, it's been discussed a whole lot at the moment, and it is worth a read. There's a lot of really impressive research in it. We are going to next share an interview segment about the Declaration of Sentiments that I'm really really excited about. But before we get into that, because it's really wonderful and I wanted to stand all on its own without interruption, let's pause for a word from one of our sponsors. As the first official women's rights document on record in the United States, the Declaration of Sentiments is incredibly important. So where did it end up, like the actual piece of paper that they worked on. That's actually a bit of a problem. But instead of telling you about it ourselves, we're gonna let Megan Smith, who's the United States Chief Technology Officer explained things. I was fortunate enough to get to speak with Megan while visiting Washington, d C. Recently, and we talked a lot about the importance of women's history and Megan's interest in the Declaration of Sentiments specifically, which actually led to the discovery. No one is entirely sure where the original document actually is, so let's jump into that conversation. So here's the big question right out of the gate, what compelled you to go looking for the Declaration of Sentiments in the first place. Right, So I think you know, there's this amazing Churchill quote, which is the further back you can look, the further forward you will see and says your Chief Technology Officer, I'm trying to help us with the future, with the economy, with empowering America, and then all the things that it takes to unlock the potential of all American people and people around the world to do their thing. And one of the things that's interesting is to look at the challenges that we've had in coming to the table, in this case women's rights and the challenges women face, especially in science, technology, engineering, that why is it that there's so few of us proportionately, And yet if you look into history you find astonishing things like Grace Hopper, the rear admiral in the Navy, who invented coding languages, the idea of a translator or compiler that takes this machine code from your English, Java or whatever that is. So she's the creator of that. She's an Edison level American. Why doesn't everyone know her name? Or Aida Lovelace from England who invented the idea of algorithms, or Katherine Johnson, the African American woman who calculated the trajectors for Ellen Shepherd, first American space, John Glenn, first American around and the Apollo mission. You know in the Apollo movies we never see a technical, mathematical and we African American woman. We need to know these stories because in knowing them, you know that even if we weren't proportionally there, we were always there at the elite level contributing. And this story is about civil rights, which is interesting. Well, at what point did you realize it was actually missing? Yes? So when I first got here, um, I asked a if the archivists of the United States, David Ferrio, who's tremendous, whether he had it, and he said he would go look for it through the archives. But he said this because it was not originally a federal dock, we might we might not have it. Um. And also the time when Arcus was founded, they have some things, but they were founded later. So he put out an all call and he was not finding it. I have a great email from Earth so here this is uh still on it? So perious see still on it? Aotis it's like trying to find it. And this is a really great piece. So you know, the Declaration of Sentiments. It stuff is the original document from Seneca Falls. Santa Falls is where the very first women's rights convention occurred and happened to be in the United States. Um, and they gathered. I believe actually that Seneca Falls because so much of abolition and women's rights were there a lot because of the Erie Canal, you know, the commerce like the Silk Road is where not only goods are traveling, but ideas and conversation. Right, so they were right on the canal and they were part of that. So they called this convention. And so David had sent over the original documents they found from the newspaper call that went in when he said that, they found the table on which it was written, and they found several other things, a pamphlet that was type set from around the time, but not the document. And so we called Seneca Falls. We called different people in Seneca Falls. They don't know where it is. They think it may be lost this time. Their theory is that Frederick Douglas, who attended the convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the original woman who a person who wrote the Declaration of Sentiments it's it's written based on the Declaration of Independence, so it says we hold these truths to be self over anent that all men and women are created equal, and then it gets into the sentiments. But we have the content because we think the sources Frederick Douglas, he of course was an incredible writer printer. He printed the Northern Star, and so we think he took it to Rochester because it is printed in the Northern Star. And one of the clues we received from this great guy, meaning Mark says he actually has a copy um of the original. He thinks there's only two that exists, the original Northern Star on page one with the Declaration on it. It also reports, he says, on the Rochester Women's Convention, which was the second one, and he said, interestingly, he had not seen the Northern Star in twenty two years of collecting until he and you got ahold of these. So really exciting stuff to find, not only just in terms of the history of Frederick Douglas is such an amazing American, but this particular history well, and it's interesting that you talk about the find because your team has come up with a really ingenious way to both leverage social media and engage the public in their own sort of efforts to help find it. Can you talk a little bit about this amazing project. Yeah, So, as I was working with archivists, I mentioned this to one of my colleagues here, Lindsay Hulst, who worked in the opposite digital strategy for the President, and uh. She and I had already collaborated on something called the Untold Stories of Women in Science and Technology, which you can find on the White House website, and it's different administration women talking about heroes that they have. Um so, uh, the administrator for the e p A UH is talking about Rachel Carson, the incredible environmentalists. So it's just really wonderful, massive leadership talking about their heroes, Sally Ride and others. So we had done that work and I mentioned this to Lindsay and she's like, we need a treasure it, and so we launched this treasure hunting and kind of a Nicolas Cage style uh, to to see if we could engage everyone, because we really need is for people to know the content of the Decoration of Sentiments, because it's one of the most comprehensive documents ever written about equality for women. And so The sentiments themselves are striking, and when the Washington Post covered our treasure hunt, they pulled some of the sentiments. One of them, they noted, was very much about equal pay, which we struggle with today, you know, seventy and around the world, uh for their challenges. So you kind of look at Elizabeth Cady Stanton wanted to go to university, she wasn't allowed, So you know, it's asking for rights to go to school, which is not unlike Malala use of side. So we have the same reality. If you look at each of the sentiments, you kind of almost redline them and say, how are we in the States, how we're in different countries? So how long do you think the Find the Sentiments project will go on? Is this planted as a long term thing or do you have an end date attached to it. We're gonna keep looking until we find more and where things. What's been really fun is to not only be looking for this the sentiments, the declaration itself, but all the other things that are surfacing. The soul Bellmont House here is a wonderful house that's really the final home of the National Women's Party for Women's Suffrage. There was, of course the Nationals Suffrage Party that was founded by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth care Stanton and others. Alice Paul later added the National Women's Party with the Federal strategy. So there was a state in the federal strategy working together. UM. So apparently there's a flag that's missing, this beautiful flag where every time a state would ratify the Nineteenth Amendment they would sell on another star. And so at the very end, there's a picture of her with the flag standing on the balcony and there she is, you know, Alice Paul, who was the first woman, the first person in the history of our country to figure out to protest the White House where the suffragette. So this is her federal strategy leadership. Married Church Terrell, founder that delta, this UH and and this group together doing this work. I would love to find that flag, and the Sylbemis folks have been looking for it for a long time. There's also a pen that there's a movie right now called Suffragette about the British women. UM. What happened was in UM Parliament recently released some testimony from nineve of the women who lived in the tenements. This particular group that worked in the laundry and it's true stories. It's based on true stories of their testimony in Parliament trying to get the vote, secure the vote, based on their lives, together with surveillance that was going on from the police. And so the story of the film Sufferject ensues from there and it's it's led Emmeline Pancarst is played by Meryl Streep and so she has a short part of but the film itself is about the foot soldiers they call it. And so Alice Paul was actually in England in those times and then came back and was part of this federal strategy. So at the time they were sent to jail a lot for fighting for the vote, and they created a pin in England. Uh, it's a jail door. And so Alice when she came back and began this idea of protesting the White House every time they went to jail, she would she eventually got a beautiful pin. Uh that we're trying to get a three D printing model from our youth to make anyone be able to print them. Um that that any woman who went to jail, hundreds of women went to jail. Uh. There was a terrible Night on the ninth. I think it's the fourteenth of November called the Night of Terror, when they were beaten very badly, but often force fed because they would go on hunger strike, just brutal um. And it's some of that fighting that turned the tide as the reporting came out, and so they would wear this jailed outdoor pin. So we're looking for those. We have a few of them, and we have, of course the design that Alice made. Do you think, like, what are your odds? Do you think I'm finding the Declaration of Sentiments? I don't know. I'm hopeful. I'm a card carrying optimist. I feel like it's got to be in some like a box in someone's attic, somewhere that their nana put away. Like we're hoping there was a fire and fed Frederick Dad was this home at one point There was a chance lost to that. But hopefully somewhere there's also some tracks like one of the emails said that Douglas traveled with the Waterloo party, which is the next town to Seneca Falls. Um that maybe there's a woman who was making gloves who became a printer. Maybe she has the original and sent another company who knows who knows what happened, but it's a wonderful story to be tracking. It's also causing us to note the different our cuts. So for example, UM at Harvard, the Radcliffe Library, UM has an extraordinary amount of collection with you know, Pennsylvania, Sewell, Bellmont, and the Library of Congress, all of of course, the women's UH inside of the women's studies programs across the United States, across the world. UM often sort of gataways a little bit as not relevant across and so it's exciting to see the lifting of the stories of all women. Are they working to develop like a comprehensive database of what they all have? We're reaching out to all of them and safe they can kind of create a gathering. We're, you know, on our way to to the women's equality UH whatever our in uh in with five years for five years out right for celebrating death centennials. So you know, can we get together and see what we want to do and with the history and also from a digital perspective, what kind of edited thoughts can we do? I was looking at Queen Victoria versus Napoleon's Wikipedia pages that I did a word cat out of Victoria's half the size of Napoleon. Now, Napoleon we love to look at because of his his military strategy, so there's a lot of detail in there, so that maybe part of it. But I think both of them were complicated historic leaders that deserve equal length. Well, Victoria is one of my favorite people, and I carry for pictures, so you're speaking my language. These edit a thought that we could do to make sure that Kipedian and our online archives are really carrying the history of everybody, because, like the Churchiquhode, it's so important to know your history in order to know your future, and especially for young women today, young people of color, who sometimes are coming up against not so much overt bias anymore, but institutional or unconscious bias. It's very confusing. Why is this happen to me? And if you don't know the history of what's gone on and what we've all worked together as humanity to get to, you don't really understand why you're not getting hurt in a meeting, or you're not getting promoted, You're not getting these things, and it's because we're still in a continue to getting to full equality for everyone. Have there been any surprises, I know it's still in its infancy in terms of getting like public involvement in it. But if you have any surprises along the way where people have brought something to your attention. Yeah, I'm just excited by all the enthusiasm and just people are looking for it all around. We've done some radio shows, are working with you guys, and it's really exciting to see people wanting to know because it's it's a great history that we have, you know, in the Americans on which you know, we stand on their shoulders that have built this country and you know, are from our founders to these different leaders throughout. So we're just exciting to see Treasury, for example, Uh, the sector of Treasury together with the Treasure verse of us are working together to bring women to money and make sure those stories are told. And so they have the astag the new ten they've gotten over three hundred women recommended, which is exciting because now we're working with the textbook folks and saying, you know, are all three hundred of these people who seem to have crowd source surface that of our consciousness is important? Are they all in our textbooks through the kids know about these all the people who have built this country together. That's so cool. Well, one of the things that's really fascinating to me, and you brought it up. Are you touched on it briefly? Mentioning Frederick Douglas, is that even when people do talk about this, which they don't often enough, the Declaration of Sentiments, it's kind of couch just as a women's document, but there are like sixty eight women's signatures, but they're thirty two men that were also there, and it's really not just a women's document. It's everybody's history and impacts all of us. Is there. Have you had any challenges or you seeking out new ways to sort of frame that and get that point across that this is not just a women's issue but in everyone's history issue. Yeah. I think actually we're seeing that across the globe. You know, in the nation's just ratified the Sustainable Development Goals and in the top level the seventeen goals that the world has set out for ourselves for the next fifteen years, gender quality is one of them. The Deputy President of South Africa was just speaking at the Open Government Partnership session in Mexico City and he was talking about for them, it's one of their primary uh focuses is piece of security and gender emancipation. It's very interesting to hear him use that word for this gender apartheid that still exists deep in our society. Uh So, I think that working on these issues is coming to the forefront of all of our thinking. There's an incredible quote in the Jefferson memorial and it says, I will get exactly right. We'll maybe put it in it's uh. I'm not a fan of the frequent change of law, he says, But I do think that as the human mind advances, as we become more enlightened, we come to own new things and understand things. And you can't fit the coat you wore as a boy, just like ideas just don't work as those of our barbarous ancestors. And I think that his language is really quite stunning. And the use of barbarous ancestors. I don't think they knew they were beating barbarous uh in creating slavery and inequality and always these horrific things that that we live with. Inequality and and uh those those challenges that we faced. But as we wake up, we need to debug them. You know, we need to come and work together to get out of the problems. Even if we didn't create them, we inherent them. And so gender equality, you know, racial equality, non Asian discrimination. All these pieces socio economic are a big part of the goals that the United Nations and the world has set for ourselves and the global goals which include justice and equality and economic opportunity and being great to our planet and all all of those pieces. So, speaking of goals, when all of this is said and done, when you guys decide it's time to wrap the Declaration of Sentiments search, whether we found it or not, Like, what do you really hope that people can take away from this having happened? I think that we want even if we can't find the physical document, we want the concept and the knowledge of the document and knowledge of its content. So many people, if you mentioned Seneca Falls, they maybe have heard of it. You know. The President Obama often says, from Seneca Falls to Selma Pastoma, you know, talking about the different moments, you know, whether it's from Philadelphia and Independence, all the way through these moments in our country where we come to work on our equality and the ark of justice, as as he says, as King said, Um so our hope is that we get this inclusion of all of us, and that documents like this and they're deep content. The specific sentiments when you read them, they're so comprehensive, and we so are still working on all of them, you know, are there for us as a vision for where we want to be. And lastly, where can people go to find out more? And if they want to help with the search? Yeah, so hash I find the sentiments on Twitter and then white how's that gov find the sentiments with dashas between or just search and find us and so learn more and there we have a post that details it. There's also a form that you can fill out and send us great information as you find it, or put it up on Twitter with us, and we'll just keep looking together. And and we're interested not only in the declaration sentiments, but all the other kinds of things like the pin, the flag, any kind of thing that tells the story of women's civil rights, women's equality, or anybody's equality. We want to be standing that up and sharing that with each other. I love it, Megan, thank you so much. This has been really amazing and I'm so excited to get people involved and get more hands on deck to do on the search. We need everyone on this. Yeah, excellent, thank you so much. We will link to a copy of the Declaration of Sentiments in the show notes so you can read the whole thing for yourself. That was mentioned in the interview. But reading through the Declaration today really is eye opening because a lot of the same exact points that it made are still being made and fought for today a hundred and sixty seven years later. One more time, that's a hundred and sixty seven years later. So we hope that if you have any connection to the Seneca False Convention, whether that's through family history or any other connection, like you purchased an antique that might have been anything, just even if it seems nebulous, please share any information that you have on social media and use the hashtag find the Sentiments. As Megan shared, whether we find the original Declaration of Sentiments or not, odds are that there is a lot of history related to this convention that hasn't been properly documented, and you might be the one to have some of that. So if you want more information, you can actually go to the White House blog and do a search for find the Sentiments or Honestly, if if you just go into any search engine and type in find the Sentiments or hashtag find the Sentiments, it's going to lead you to this particular blog post that Megan wrote that explains the whole project and how they went on this search and how they have launched this initiative, and it will also give you a little form that you can fill out right there. But I will read out the u r L which is www dot white House dot gov, slash blog, slash find dash the dash sentiments, And as I said, there's a great little form there. But you can also just go to social media and uh post your thoughts and your information using hashtag find the Sentiments, And we hope you do, because it's a wonderful way to get people involved in the historical discovery process and you know, they're really crowdsourcing a new chapter in sort of really flashing out American history and specifically women's history. So it's a pretty cool way that you can contribute. Do you also have some listener mail for us? I do. This one is a really fun for me because it involves some science that I would not have known. Uh. It is in relation to our Mike Malloy episode and the the title of the email, and I loved it the second I even saw it. Was why they didn't kill Mike Malloy at first? And it comes from our listener Paul, who is a doctor, so he knows about these things, and he says, Holly and Tracy, by treating Mike Malloy to an open bar tab, the buffoon murderers were actually giving Mike the antidote to wood alcohol methanol poisoning. Until two thousand, the standard treatment for methanol poisoning was actually to give ethanol by I V. Little did these fools realize that by getting Mike drunk on booze ethanol first, they were protecting him from the toxic effects of methanol. Also, by running over Mike in a narrow tire vehicle typical of the time, with snow on the ground, they probably broke a few ribs, but the snow actually cushioned Mike and the narrow tubular tire could do little damage. And as to how human beings could conspire to do such a thing, remember that three was the year Hitler's rise to power, So it's an interesting connection, but it is really cool. I certainly did not know about the treatment to methanol poisoning being ethanol. So that's a pretty fascinating little twist to that story that explains why he just kept going and going and going despite them filling him with me. Yeah, and a couple of different people have written to us with that tidbit of knowledge. It's very cool. I did not know, and now it's additional science in my mental library. Hopefully I will not lose it. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at Householpworks dot com. We're also at Facebook dot com, slash mist in History, on Twitter at mist in History, at pinterest dot com, slash mist in History, and at mist in history dot tumbler dot com. You can also find us on Instagram at mist in History. If you would like to research a little bit more about what we talked about today, you can go to our parents parent site, House done Works. Type in the word feminism or women's rights in the search bar and you're gonna get a lot of different articles. Will have a lot of crossover as well with the ladies from stuff Mob never told to you. In those results, and there's just a great whole wealth of knowledge to explore. You can also visit us at mr history dot com, where we have all of our back episodes archived for you. We have show notes from the episodes that Tracy and I have worked on together, and occasionally other little goodies. So we encourage you to visit us at houst works dot com and Mr Industry dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff works dot