You’ve heard of the Boston Tea Party. But the Waterloo Tea Party, a tea held in 1848 in Waterloo, New York, gets far less attention than the event where American colonists dumped British tea into Boston Harbor to protest taxation without representation.
Yet, this tea basically gave birth to the national women’s rights movement. Jane Hunt invited Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Lucretia’s sister Martha Coffin Wright, and Mary Ann McClintock to her home to air their grievances about the injustices women faced—barred from owning property, voting, managing their own money, or even having legal guardianship of their children. Ten days later, they held the first women’s rights convention in the United States in nearby Seneca Falls, in upstate New York’s Finger Lakes region.
Here, Elizabeth read the “Declaration of Sentiments,” modeled after the Declaration of Independence, stating that men and women are equal under the law, which many attendees, both men and women, signed. After this 1848 convention started a groundswell of support, women finally won the right to vote nationwide in 1920, when the 19th Amendment was passed.
