Another reform movement closely associated with the abolitionist movement championed by Frederick Douglass was the emerging movement for women's rights. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, among the leaders of this movement, famously publicly advocated the right to vote for women at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 (Douglass himself was in attendance at this convention).
Stanton and other advocates for women's rights would argue that "justice was denied" by women's inability to serve on juries and to vote in elections for politicians whose decisions directly affected them. They would say that "poverty is enforced" by the fact that women's lives were totally dependent on their husbands. Marriage law at the time mandated that women's property would pass to their husbands upon marriage. They might also point out, as Stanton did, that women were denied access to the numerous lucrative professions that were emerging as part of the Market Revolution, and that "poverty was enforced" in this way. That "ignorance" prevailed for women was fairly obvious, as opportunities for higher learning were almost completely closed for them. For these reasons and more, the "Declaration of Sentiments" issued by the Seneca Falls Convention echoed the Declaration of Independence when it claimed that
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.
In the minds of these reformers, patriarchal society had indeed been a sort of conspiracy to "oppress, rob, and degrade" women.
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