Human Rights. Equal Rights.
Yes, I believe that all humans deserve equal rights. I believe this with all my might.
Every human being is born with certain inalienable rights, regardless of their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or any other factor. It is just how things should go. I do not know how anyone could think otherwise. How can people believe that they are somehow superior to other human beings?
Back to those inalienable rights. These rights include the right to life, liberty, and the security of a person in their life. They include the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. The right to freedom of expression and the right to equal protection under the law.
There are many reasons why all humans deserve equal rights.
First, all humans are created equal. We are all born with the same basic human potential, regardless of our circumstances.
Second, all humans have the same capacity for suffering. We all experience pain and loss, and we all want to be happy and fulfilled.
Third, all humans are interdependent. We need each other to survive on this planet. At least, that is my belief.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, affirms the principle of equal rights for all humans. The Declaration states that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” It also states that “no one shall be subjected to discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
A lot of people in history have worked hard to protect this principle, this ideal.
So we should celebrate this day because on this date, October 23, 1850, Suffragist organizers held the first-ever National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were bold people, I’ll tell you. Most of them were women.
More than 1,000 delegates from 11 states were there for the two-day conference. The event had been planned by members of the Anti-Slavery Society. (That’s right. Back then, many people in the Anti-Slavery Society were also working for women’s equal rights, particularly the right to vote.)
The event’s organizers and attendees faced stiff opposition from most Americans. Back then, most people (men and women) believed that a legal and economic system that disenfranchised women was natural. They read that Bible, which told them that wives should be submissive to their husbands. I guess this leaks out and affects all women, then.
So, with that in mind, the organizers hoped to create a national organization that could build a popular movement.
Lucy Stone (I love her name) was one of many speakers who argued for equal enfranchisement for women. She said on that day:
“We want that [women] should attain to the development of her nature and womanhood; we want that when she dies, it may not be written on her gravestone that she was the [widow] of somebody.”
This movement was brave and fierce. Yet, it had its troubles too. You see, these conventions continued up until the twelfth convention in 1869 in Washington, D.C.. But then, the “front” split over the question of whether Black men should have suffrage.
The National Woman Suffrage Association, founded by suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, directly opposed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to give African American men the vote. Instead, they believed that women’s suffrage and their equality with men were more urgent political issues.
The American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Lucy Stone and other organizers, DID support universal suffrage, though they focused solely on universal voting rights and not on other social or economic rights.
It would take more than two decades before these two groups would come back together (1890). They reunited as the National American Women’s Suffrage Association or NAWSA.
Thirty years more passed. And then. The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which granted women the right to vote, was ratified in 1920.
But on this date, in 1850, some mighty women spoke for freedom.
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“I think, with never-ending gratitude, that the young women of today do not and can never know at what price their right to free speech and to speak at all in public has been earned.” (From her speech, “The Progress of Fifty Years”)
— Lucy Stone
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“We want rights. The flour-merchant, the house-builder, and the postman charge us no less on account of our sex; but when we endeavor to earn money to pay all these, then, indeed, we find the difference.”
— Lucy Stone
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“‘We, the people of the United States.’ Which ‘We, the people’? The women were not included.”
— Lucy Stone
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Those might women making it right
