Question-
What do Seneca Falls, New York, and Tenafly, New Jersey have in common?
Answer-
Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
“This is Coline Jenkins and I; ‘m the great great-grandaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton who lived in Tenafly, NJ, and Seneca Falls, NY and this is a great opportunity to link these two cities or towns and call them sister towns or sister cities.”
Jenkins says she is working to have both town governments later this year pass resolutions approving the sister city status.
“The point is Elizabeth Cady Stanton was involved in the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls. It changed the world. It granted women the right to vote eventually with the 19th Amendment of the US Constitution. That’s just the early part of her life. The latter part of her life she was living in New York City but then the Civil War came along so they moved down to Tenafly, NJ. And so in Tenafly, she has a different life. She’s actually doing this enormous lecture circuit all through the US and she becomes quite wealthy and she decides to build a house the house in Tenafly which is great and wonderfully preserved and privately owned is where Susan B Anthony came and they wrote the history of women suffrage to try to sum up everything they had been doing nationwide.”
Jenkins, who lives in Connecticut, will visit Seneca Falls next week during the Convention Days weekend. Convention Days is the annual celebration of the first Women’s Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls in 1848.
