Kathryn Cullen-DuPont

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The Declaration of Sentiments, signed by 100 people at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, was the founding document of the official women's movement in the United States. Consciously modeled after the United States Declaration of Independence, it begins with words that echo that document:
“. . . .We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Where the Declaration of Independence had accused England’s King George, the women’s Declaration of Rights and Sentiments accused all men: It accused them of denying women the right of suffrage; of forcing them to obey laws that that they had not participated in forming; of causing them to suffer a civil death upon marriage; and of depriving them of property rights and wages. (At the time, married women were not allowed to own property, and married women’s wages belonged to their husbands.) the Declaration further accused men of trying to deprive women of a moral sense; as evidence of this claim, it mentioned laws that empowered husbands to punish their wives with physical force and laws that held women inculpable for crimes committed in the presence of their legally responsible husbands. Men were further accused of drafting divorce laws that that gave no consideration to women’s happiness and that granted custody of the children to their fathers; of barring women from colleges, the ministry, and professions; and of devising different moral codes for men and women.

Twelve resolutions, demanding redress of these grievances, followed. One resolution went so far as to state that “such laws [that] conflict, in any way, with the true and substantial happiness of women, are contrary to the great precept of nature and of no validity.” Other resolutions demanded education equal to that of men, admission into the profession and the trades, the right to speak in public, and the right to become religious leaders—and women’s suffrage. This last demand (the ninth of twelve resolutions in the document) caused the greatest controversy, both at the Seneca Falls Convention and in newspapers and the pulpit afterward; while all the other resolutions were passed unanimously, the suffrage resolution passed only narrowly. So great was the was the ensuing public outcry and private pressure from male family members--especially with regard to the demand for women’s suffrage—that many of the female signatories removed their names in the weeks following the Convention.

Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science Church, was born on July 16, 1821, near Bow, New Hampshire.

The poet Emma Lazarus was born on July 22, 1849, in New York City. Her sonnet, "The New Colossus," is emblazoned on the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Ida B. Wells (later, Wells-Barnett), was born on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi. A journalist, suffragist, and African-American rights leader, Wells-Barnett fought for women's suffrage and campaigned against the lynching of African-American men.

Mary McLeod Bethune, was born Mary McLeod on July 10, 1897, near Mayesville, South Carolina. An educator, civil rights leader and presidential advisor, Bethune was a founder of the National Council of Negro Women, a leading figure in the National Association of Colored Women, and, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, director of the U.S. Division of Negro Affairs.

Amelia Mary Earhart, famed aviator, was born on July 24, 1987, in Atchinson, Kansas.

Bella Savitsky Abzug, women's rights leader and the first Jewish woman to be elected to the House of Representatives, was born on July 24, 1920, in New York City.

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, the second woman to win the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine (1977), was born on July 19, 1921.

Patricia Scott Schroeder, a United States Representative from Colorado from 1973 to 1996, was born on July 3l, 1940, in Portland, Oregon. Congress' most senior female member for many years, Schroeder is currently the president and chief executive officer of the Association of American Publishers.

On July 10, 1813, the decision of a Pennsylvania court in Pennsylvania v. Addicks introduced the principle of a child's "best interest" into custody cases. Prior to this, a father had unquestioned guardianship over his children (indeed, a father could leave guardianship of his children to someone other than the children's mother). This decision, in which a court refused to remove a divorced couple's children from their mother's care, was based on the the children's "tender age" and not on consideration of their mother's rights.

The Seneca Falls Convention, which launched the women's rights movement in the United States, was held in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19 and 20, 1848; sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments.

In July, 1865, Clara Barton traveled to the concentration camp at Andersonville, Georgia, where she organized the identification of 13,000 graves of Union soldiers who had died as prisoners of war. Before the end of the year, she became head of the Missing Soldier's Office and the first woman to head a U.S. government bureau.

On July 2, 1868, a Pennsylvania court convicted Hester Vaughn of first-degree murder and sentenced her to death. Vaughn was a poor teenager who had given birth alone in an unheated rented room, and there was conflicting medical testimony as to how her child might have died following this delivery. Since women were barred from jury service at the time, women's rights leaders protested that Vaughn was convicted without a "jury of her peers." So many women joined the protest that Vaughn was not executed, but deported to her native England.

The Fourteenth Amendment, granting citizenship to African Americans, was ratified on July 28, 1869. The amendment was initially opposed by some women's rights leaders for penalizing states that prohibited male citizens from voting, thus inserting the word "male" into the U.S. Constitution for the first time and seeming to call into question the citizenship of American women. Within the next few years, however, women's rights leaders began to argue that women were entitled to vote (and to excercise other rights of citizenship) pursuant to Section 1 of the amendment, which forbade any state to "make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens...." U.S. Supreme Court ruled twice in the 19th century that women's rights were not protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1971, the Court ruled for the first time that women's rights were protected under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Daughters of St. Crispin, a union of female shoe workers, was founded on July 28, 1969, in Lynn, Massachusetts.

Wyoming was admitted to the Union on July 23, 1890, with—controversially—women’s suffrage as part of its state constitution.

Maggie Lena Walker became the nation's first African-American bank president when she took over the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Virginia, on July 28, 1903.

In July, 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment was proposed by lawyer and veteran suffragist Alice Paul in Seneca Falls, New York, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention. The amendment, as drafted by Paul, stated simply that "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction."

In its July 1, 1982 ruling in Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, the U.S. Supreme court ruled that a public college's sex-segregated college admissions policy was unconstitutional. The decision permitted the male Joe Hogal to enter a previously all-female nursing school, and it was cited as precedent in U.S. v. Virginia (1996), which compelled the last two state-supported all-male colleges in the U.S. to admit women or do without state funding. (Both colleges, the Virginia Military Institute and the Citidel, chose to admit women.)

In its July 3, 1984, decision in Roberts v. United States Jaycees, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Minnesota was correct to require that the Jaycees, a business organization, admit women to full membership.