When I think of furniture associated with power, I envision the ponderous president’s desk in the oval office and the long, gleaming tables in corporate boardrooms. Both Jefferson and Stanton, however, composed their world-shaking documents on more humble writing surfaces. The American demand for independence was largely written on the portable lap desk that Jefferson designed to take with him to increase his productive hours on the 200-mile coach journey between Monticello and the Second Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, during which the Declaration was approved.
Built to Jefferson’s specifications by cabinetmaker and patriot Benjamin Randolph in 1776, the mahogany “writing box” included an adjustable book rest which opened into a 9-3/4-inch by 14-3/8-inch writing surface above a drawer with compartments for his glass inkwell, pens, and paper. However modest its size, “[o]n that desk,” wrote Senator Warfield Johnston of Virginia when arguing for its acceptance for display at the U.S. State Department, “was done a work greater than any battle, loftier than any poem, more enduring than any monument….” And I believe the same could be said for the small oval desk around which another great revolution in American history was born.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal . . . .
I get chills when I imagine being in the audience to hear Elizabeth Cady Stanton read these words from the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions at the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention on July 19, 1848. How thrilling it must have been for the three hundred women and men present in the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York—and, for some of them, how blasphemous—to hear the familiar and beloved words from the Declaration of Independence echoed in this call for women’s social equality.
It’s amazing to consider how quickly and adroitly the convention was conceived, planned, and carried out. Just as the Boston Tea Party had been a precursor of the American Revolution, the tea party to which Quaker and abolitionist Jane Hunt of Waterloo, New York, invited four like-minded women on July 15, 1848, launched the American women’s movement. What began as a social event swiftly evolved into a political one as the women discussed their grave dissatisfactions with nearly every aspect of women’s lives—from their being prohibited from earning a living to taxation without representation. There and then, they resolved to hold a convention in less than a week that would set an agenda for reform. In this modern era of flash mobs and social media, it’s not difficult to imagine drawing three hundred people to an event, even one held with only a few days’ notice in a small, rural town. Yet it’s difficult to imagine, in the mid-nineteenth century—before phones, computers, and social media— how they managed to organize, strategize, and, in the end, pull it off.
After placing an ad for the convention in the Seneca Falls Courier the day of that July tea party, the women agreed to meet the following day at Mary Beth McClintock’s home. There they gathered in the parlor around a small (24” by 36”) mahogany tilt-top table to compose the Declaration of Sentiments. Although the document is credited asa collaborative effort, there is no question that Stanton was the primary author. While the “Declaration of Sentiments Table,” as it is catalogued at the National Museum of American History, is the official site of the document’s creation, it seems probable that Stanton had rushed home the night before and sketched it out—or perhaps fully drafted it—at her own desk or kitchen table after her three young children (of the eight she eventually raised) were asleep for the night.
Of the eighteen grievances and eleven resolutions Stanton proposed in the Declaration, her colleagues raised serious concerns with only one, the most controversial, demanding women’s right to the “elective franchise.” “Why, Lizzie,” Lucretia Mott protested, “thee will make us ridiculous!” Nevertheless, Stanton convinced her friends that, without the right to vote, none of the other resolutions had a chance of succeeding long-term. Although hotly debated at the convention, the resolution was finally among all the others adopted.
Comparing the mental image of five women working together around that small oval table to one of Thomas Jefferson writing alone on his lap desk as a stagecoach carried him to and from Philadelphia, it’s tempting to conclude, as many feminists would, that women work collaboratively to accomplish their goals while men work individually. Yet, although Thomas Jefferson is considered the sole author of the document that crystallized American resistance to British tyranny (indeed, his authorship is crucial to the legend of his greatness), it is quietly acknowledged that not all of that Declaration was written on his small lap desk and that a few other men—including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin—contributed to the document. Conversely, the story surrounding the Declaration of Sentiments’ composition tilts too far to the side of communal creation. Even if we didn’t know that Lucretia Mott was shocked by Stanton’s resolution concerning the vote, the boldness and brilliance of echoing the structure and language of the Declaration of Independence has Stanton’s name all over it.
My only experience of communal writing produced a document that was far from brilliant, even if some considered it ridiculously bold. In 1989, I was hired by a small state college in a conservative, rural Pennsylvania county to teach English and create a Women’s Studies program. I don’t know if it was fear or humility—or perhaps my feminist background—that caused me to form a committee to help create a proposal for the program as soon as I hit campus. Fear because I was an untenured assistant professor; humility because a few other women on campus were already teaching women’s studies courses, and I hoped their experience and institutional memories would help the program’s proposal slide easily through the campus machinery toward approval.
After the committee met several times to design a Women’s Studies minor and outline the resources necessary to support it, I met with my colleague Sue (the only female full professor on campus) a few times a week over two months in my office to draft the proposal. With her springy silver hair and jovial good looks, Sue reminded me of photos I’d seen of Stanton in midlife. We worked well together, basing our proposal on the successful one recently passed by one of our sister state schools. Except for its aim, there was nothing rhetorically stirring about what we wrote. In fact, much of our strategy involved trying to make it seem as unthreatening as possible—more mundanity than manifesto. In fact, our writing was as dull as the surface of the standard-issue, gray metallic desk where we composed it on my computer.
Although our former football-coach president had signed off on my university appointment, I sensed that the women’s studies part of my job—which had been the provost’s idea, not his—made his balls shrivel. The day I met with our all-male Council of Trustees (around a long, highly polished table in the provost’s office) I dressed in a flowing, floral-patterned dress, beads, and pantyhose (joking with my husband that I was “going in drag”) hoping this ultra-feminine, wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing get-up would put them at ease.
Nevertheless, the meeting opened with one of the trustees glaring at me and asking, “Why do we have to be so cutting edge?” I smiled as demurely as I could, assuring him that we were, actually, twenty years behind the rest of the nation’s colleges in this regard. He seemed mollified. Then another gentleman mentioned that the Women’s Studies director at Penn State had several times “embarrassed the university” when she was consulted by and quoted in the newspaper on women’s rights-related topics. (“Lizzie, thee will make us ridiculous!”) “Is that going to happen here?” he asked, adamantly. Although it was a struggle to keep from giggling, I reassured him that I really didn’t think that would be a problem.“Well, as long as we don’t attract every lesbian in the county,” he grumbled. Under other circumstances, I would have demanded to know why we wouldn’t want lesbians at our university. But I wasn’t there on my own behalf, and before I stomped out in my high heels, I remembered that all women—gay and straight—would benefit from the program once it was in place. So I chose to ignore him, even though I wanted to say that, as far as I could tell, most of the county’s lesbian populace was already on campus in one capacity or another.
When our proposal passed the campus curriculum committee and was eventually approved by our Chancellor, Sue and I and the rest of the committee were probably as jubilant as Stanton and her colleagues must have been when sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed the Declaration of Sentiments that day in 1848—even though the desk time Sue and I put in had been far longer, resulted in a far from memorable document, and promised far less potential impact than the one they had created in just two afternoons—their Declaration having included no cowardice or compromises.
When the National Park Service guide led my Introduction to Women’s Studies class into the second-story nursery of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s home in Seneca Falls the next fall, I heard gasps from some of the students as she escorted us to the small oak secretary desk. “Was this really hers?” one asked in an astonished whisper, extending her hand. “Please don’t touch,” the guide said gently, smiling at her enthusiasm. The desk’s ornately carved lid was closed, and the student’s impulse to touch it reminded me of a reverent daughter’s reaching out to pat the lid of her mother’s coffin. I looked on affectionately as the students snapped photographs of the desk. and took turns posing beside it. I wasn’t their mother, but I felt as if I’d died and gone to heaven as I watched my students pose for photo ops beside the desk, as though they stood beside a rock star or a best friend. We had spent the first third of the semester on the Suffrage Movement, and at that moment I knew it had been time well spent, that the lessons of the movement had not only engaged their minds but also had entered their hearts.
As I sit at my own teak desk, given to me by my parents decades ago to mark my earning my Ph.D., I seriously doubt that it will end up in the Smithsonian along with Stanton’s and Jefferson’s. Nevertheless, I like to think that I incited revolutions in my women students’ minds over the twenty-five years I taught that introductory course, revolutions that would cause them to take themselves seriously and inspire them to exercise their hard-won right to vote. Especially today, when women’s right to reproductive choice is seriously threatened and the nation is still recovering from a racist and misogynist president, I like to imagine those women thinking of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s desk as they march toward their voting booths.
Author's Comment
Although most might think of a bed as the most intimate piece of furniture in a home, I would suggest that it might actually be a desk. We writers cozy up to our desks and write of what resides in our deepest hearts and souls. “Declaration of Desks” was written as part of a series of essays about desks—some autobiographical and some about famous desks like the ones in this essay.
Woolf’s pen runs dry, Tesla holes up, Lincoln emerges in yet another bardo, and the witnesses for peace include soldiers under duress, models transformed to artists, descendants of forced immigrants, survivors of hurricanes.
Ember Days begins with ritual and ends with prayer as the poems tunnel through Wednesday’s jammed boulevards, Friday’s worthless cash, Saturday’s prodigal feet.
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Judith Sornberger's most recent poetry collection is The Book of Muses (Finishing Line Press). She is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently Angel Chimes: Poems of Advent and Christmas (Shanti Arts), and five other chapbooks. Her spiritual/travel prose memoir The Accidental Pilgrim: Finding God and His Mother in Tuscany is also from Shanti Arts. Judith is a professor emerita at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania, where she founded the Women's Studies Program and taught English and Creative Writing. She lives on the side of a mountain outside Wellsboro PA. Her website address is:
A wonderful essay, thank you. In a recent memoir, I wrote about my own desk, repeatedly as a raft I clung to that helped me define myself as a young wife and mother, as I navigated my search for full personhood and how to become a writer.
I’m grateful that you are positioning Women’s desks so prominently. 🥰