The Declaration of Sentiments, modeled after the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, was written and adopted at the first Women's Rights Convention in the United States, held in Seneca Falls, New York, the nineteenth and twentieth of July, 1848. After initial derision, many setbacks, and a long battle, women's right to vote became a reality in 1920. Like the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Sentiments did not create the rights it articulated; it affirmed the rights that we believe we are born with in the kind of society in which we wish to live. Consciousness of these rights and the need to express them arose because of abuses that grew intolerable over time. In the United States, the compelling logic and clear expression of inherent liberties in the Declaration of Independence laid the groundwork in social and political thought for the emancipation of slaves and women's suffrage, concepts the signers may not have envisioned. The Declaration of Sentiments was condemned by many; it mimicked the Declaration of Independence and in so doing was seen to trivialize a revered past social and political revolution. In hindsight, nearly everyone in the U.S. now accepts and takes for granted the truth and right of what both documents say.
Inspired by this example of what can be accomplished -- monumental progress in social consciousness through articulating and defending a right not previously committed to writing and using the document to overcome opposition by itemizing the abuses of a little respected right and appealing to the profoundly convincing core belief in human freedom and dignity ...
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of humankind to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied in recent memory, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of others requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all human beings 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. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience has shown that humankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves, by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to reform or throw off such government, and to provide new safeguards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance under this government of the men, women, boys and girls not in motor vehicles, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled.
The history of city-building since the takeover by automobiles earlier in this century is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of a partly callous, partly thoughtless, partly shortsightedly "modernist" controlling majority in positions of power in government, design, construction, and industry, particularly automotive manufacturing and retail, and the press, toward people in cities who are not in motor vehicles, having in direct object the establishment and proliferation of an absolute proscription from streets and roadways of people inconvenient to speeding motor vehicles. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world:
This controlling majority has never acknowledged or permitted pedestrians to exercise the inalienable right to walk and roll in safety and comfort along and across all streets.
It has compelled pedestrians to submit to laws and designs, in the formation of which they have not been considered equals to people driving vehicles, whose turning radius, speed, and freedom from even minor delays have been considered paramount.
It has withheld from them the right to access to whole sections of the city carved away and separated by wide interchanges that ban pedestrians or which are instead given generously to the visitors foreign and domestic from suburb, farm, or other cities, near and far, passing through in vehicles or parking their vehicles and visiting briefly, ironically valuing their pedestrian experiences in a few special places as highlights of visits and even preferred destinations, unmindful of the local communities nearby or through which these visitors travel only in motor vehicles.
Having deprived them of this first right of an urban citizen, the right to walk and roll on all streets, thereby leaving them without safe transportation, and without equal representation in the halls of the market place or the legislature, it has oppressed them on all sides.
It has made them, if walking or rolling along streets without sidewalks, in the eye of the law, hazards and violators of motorists' rights; their peace, comfort, safety, health, and lives are held in such low esteem that punishments for violating their rights and liability to them or their estates for wrongs are seldom seriously pursued.
It has taken from them all practical right to public right of way, even to travel to and from jobs for wages enough to buy an automobile, or to travel to an automobile dealer, or visit a cemetery.
It has made them, morally, an irresponsible being, as they must commit many crimes, with impunity, provided they be done out of the presence of motor vehicles. In the intersection, they are compelled to yield to any vehicle, it becoming, to all intents and purposes, their master - the law giving it power to deprive them of their lives and liberty, and to administer chastisements of loud motor-revving, tire-screeching, horn-honking, shouts, foul smells, insulting gestures, littering, harsh wind gusts, dust-gravel-mud-or-water spraying, vehicular assault, and injury or death.
It has so framed the laws of traffic and development as to what shall be the proper causes of citations and variances; in case of public right-of-way for whom the use of public easement for walking by children or adults shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of pedestrians - the law, in all cases, going upon the false supposition of the supremacy of vehicle users and property owners disrespectful of community, and giving all power into their hands.
After depriving them of all rights as an equal user of public infrastructure, if the owner of property or renter whose landlord pays taxes from rents, it has taxed them to support a government which recognizes them only as taxpayers and hazards to protect motorists from with expensive and ever more complex interchanges, wider lanes and buffers, higher fences, and faster-flowing, uncrossable roadways.
It has allowed motor vehicles to monopolize and destroy the land through pollution and erosion, and to fill the land with roads and parking lots and otherwise despoil from pedestrian view and use nearly all the beautiful and convenient thoroughfares between homes and profitable employments. And from too many of such areas that they are permitted access to they can receive but a scanty use because of short-timed or missing traffic lights; absence of drinking, washing or rest room facilities; broken, automobile-blocked, garbage-container-blocked, automatic-sprinkler-sprayed, littered, boulder-or-brush-covered, low-tree-limb canopied; or absent sidewalks; or sidewalks with ill-placed mail-boxes, sign and utility poles, utility boxes, vehicle barricades, construction materials and equipment, and other hazards. For any access without a personal vehicle to most areas they must endure great hardship to reach public transit services because of the long distances resulting from motor-vehicle-scaled, low-density and segregated-use development.
It closes against them the avenues landscaped with greatest beauty, wealth, distinction and prestige, which it considers most honorable for motorists to view fleetingly from a distance as they speed by.
It has denied them and itself the facilities and government-supported institutional means of receiving and creatively adapting -- to make more socially inclusive and democratic as well as more technologically sophisticated -- the rich cultural and practical scientific traditions, education, appreciation, understanding and consciousness of the inter-related humane, aesthetic, ethical, sensual, spiritual, and intellectual theory and practice of critical aspects of important human activity including but not limited to playing, resting, socializing, talking, watching, walking, shopping, selling, cooking, sitting, contemplating, as well as the disciplines of economics, planning, administration, sociology, language, accounting, child development, gerontology, medicine, law, religions, commerce, geography, politics, anthropology, psychology, natural sciences, journalism, history, philosophy, literature, design, architecture, performing and visual arts, crafts and not least engineering, that are essential to creating and enjoying the infrastructure required for a free, democratic and civilized community in a modern urban environment -- streets for people.
It allows them access to shopping, worship, business, dining, entertainment, schools and government buildings but only through inconvenient subordinate means, claiming design aesthetics (such as broad lawns and parking lots dotted with exotic plants suited to golf-courses or hothouses) and demands of safety and efficiency of traffic flow as authority for their exclusion from many roadways and entrances off parking lots, resulting in long unsheltered walks from transit stops to building entrances or along roadways.
It has created a false public sentiment, by giving to the world a different code of morals for them and people in vehicles and by which moral delinquencies which exclude from streets and endanger pedestrians are not only tolerated but deemed of little account.
It has usurped the prerogative of God, claiming it as its right to assign for them a sphere of action, when that belongs to their consciences and their God.
It has endeavored, in every way that it could to destroy the confidence of people who walk in their own powers, to lessen their self-respect, and to make them willing to lead a polluting, expensive, isolated, vehicle-dependent and abject life or walk and roll in misery, danger and fear.
Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of -- temporarily at least at one time or another -- all the people of the city, their social and physical degradation, in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because pedestrians do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have full, immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as human beings and as citizens of these United States, the State of Texas, the County of Travis, and the City of Austin.
In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the city, county, regional, state and national legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit, performing and visual arts and all communications media in our behalf. We hope this event will be followed by a series of like events, embracing every part of the city, and eventually the county, the state, and the country.
Firmly relying upon the final triumph of the Right and the True, we do this day affix our signatures to this declaration.