Coline Jenkins, great-great granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, spoke just weeks ago at the anniversary celebration of the Declaration of Sentiments, recalling her time as a teen visiting her grandmother who had “all the original major works of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her attic— The Declaration of Sentiments, The Woman’s Bible.” It was only years later, she said, that it dawned on her that she had been but “two floors away from all that history.” She further reflected on how, as a girl staying at a campground near Seneca Falls, she had gone to a laundromat that, as it turned out, was formerly the site of the Wesleyan Chapel—the site of the “largest bestowal of democratic freedoms in the U.S.” Could one imagine, she asked, “a laundromat in Independence Hall?”
Betty M. Bayer
Betty M Bayer is professor and chair of Women’s Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is currently working on a book in her field of psychology about the history of cognitive dissonance and its introduction in the study When Prophecy Fails, a work that reconsiders relations amongst religion, psychology and spirituality.
