We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton used this line in 1848 in the opening of the “Declaration of Sentiments,” drafted for the Seneca Falls Convention in Seneca Falls, New York—the first major women’s rights convention in the United States. Modeled deliberately on the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the document recast the nation’s founding language to indict women’s legal and civic subordination and to ground women’s rights claims in the same natural-rights framework Americans revered. The convention, organized by Stanton along with Lucretia Mott and others, issued resolutions including the controversial demand for woman suffrage, making the “men and women” revision a pointed political and rhetorical intervention.

By inserting “and women” into the most famous sentence of the Declaration of Independence, Stanton both borrows and challenges American political scripture. The phrase asserts that equality is not a new or special-interest claim but a “self-evident” truth already embedded in the nation’s professed ideals—one that has been inconsistently applied. The rhetorical strategy is double-edged: it legitimizes women’s rights by anchoring them in founding principles, while exposing the hypocrisy of a republic that proclaims universal equality yet denies women political representation and legal autonomy. The line thus functions as a moral indictment and a constitutional-style preamble for reform.

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.