Page "Seneca Falls Convention" Paragraph 49

Historian Gerda Lerner has pointed out that religious ideas provided a fundamental source for the Declaration of Sentiments.

Most of the women attending the convention were active in Quaker or evangelical Methodist movements.

The document itself drew from writings by the evangelical Quaker Sarah Grimké to make biblical claims that God had created woman equal to man and that man had usurped God's authority by establishing " absolute tyranny " over woman.

According to author Jami Carlacio, Grimké's writings opened the public's eyes to ideas like women's rights, and for the first time they were willing to question conventional notions about the subordination of women.