Women's Rights National Historic Park - M'Clintock House
Welcome to one of the few national parks dedicated to a social movement - women's rights.
Here in Seneca Falls and Waterloo, in living rooms and on front porches, in private and in public, a group of five women started a movement that would transform American society.
In 1848, those five women summoned reformers from across the northeast to the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls. For two days, as many as 300 women and men considered the role of women in a democratic society. They emerged with the Declaration of Sentiments - a document that shaped a reform movement for decades to come. Indeed, it continues today.
Women's Rights National Historic Park includes the Wesleyan Chapel and the homes of some of the movement's organizers - places where radical thought turned into enduring improvement for millions across the world.
The M'Clintocks: Universal Belief in Equal Rights
"At Thomas McClintock's... we met... most of the men and women prominent in reform... Famous and friendless guests often sat together there, and colors and creeds alike were forgotten."
When the M'Clintock family moved from Philadelphia to Waterloo in 1836, they found a community hospitable to their family, their business, their faith, and their activism. As Quakers, they worked to end slavery and other oppressions of the human spirit. In their home, and in the drugstore and bookstore in the business block immediately behind it, they created a focal point for human rights advocates in the Waterloo area.
In 1848, Mary Ann and Thomas M'Clintock engaged the social debate that would define them in history's eyes. On July 16, the M'Clintocks welcomed into their home Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others to prepare for the First Women's Rights Convention. Their efforts to accord equal rights to women were but an extension of their family's universal belief in equal rights for all.
Marker is on East Williams Street just from North Virginia Street, on the right when traveling east.
Courtesy hmdb.org
