Hi I'm Holly from Stuff you Missed in History
Class and today we're going to talk about
a really important document.
It's called The Declaration of Sentiments
and it is the first time that someone put
on paper in the United States, the declaration
that women should have some equal rights.
And that's all very cool, except that document's
missing.
No one knows where it is.
-So here's the big question right out of the
gate, what compelled you to go looking for
the Declaration of Sentiments in the first
place?
-Right, so, there's this amazing Churchill
quote, which is, "The further back you can
look, the farther forward you will see."
And so as U.S. Chief Technology Officer, I'm
trying to help us with the future, with the
economy, with empowering americans and all
the things that it takes to unlock the potential
of all the American people and people around
the world to do their thing.
And one of the things that is interesting
is to look at the challenges that we've had
in coming to the table in this case women's
rights and the challenges women face, especially
in science, technology, engineering and math.
Why is it that there's so few of us proportionally
and if you look to history you find astonishing
things like Grace Hopper, the Rear Admiral
of the Navy who invented coding languages.
The idea of a translator or compiler that
takes this machine code from your englishy
java or whatever it is.
So she's the creator of that, she's an Edison-level
American.
Why doesn't everyone know her name.
Or Ada Lovelace, from England who invented
the idea of algorithms.
Or Catherine Johnson, the African-American
woman who calculated the trajectories for
Allen Shepard, first American in space, John
Glenn, first American around, and the Apollo
mission.
You know in the Apollo movies you never see
an technical, mathematical, elite african-american
woman.
We need to know these stories because in knowing
them they know that even if we weren't proportionally
there, we were always there at the elite level
contributing.
And this story is about civil rights, which
is interesting.
So, you know, the Declaration of Sentiments
itself is the original document from Seneca
Falls.
Seneca Falls is where the first women's rights
convention occurred and happened to be in
the United States.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the original woman
who wrote the declaration of sentiments.
It's written based on the Declaration of Independence.
So it says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men and women are created equal."
And then it gets into the sentiments.
So the sentiments themselves are striking.
And when the Washington Post covered our treasure
hunt, they pulled some of the sentiments,
one of them they noted was very much about
equal pay, which we struggle with today.
You know, 79% and around the world, further
challenges.
So you kind of look at Elizabeth Cady Stanton
wanted to go to university, she wasn't allowed.
So you know, it's asking for rights to go
to school, which is not unlike Malala Yousafzai.
So we have the same reality if you look at
each of the sentiments you could kind of almost
red-line them and say how are we in the United
States, how are we in different countries.
-Well and it's interesting that you talk about
the find because your team has come up with
a really ingenious way to both leverage social
media and engage the public in their own sort
of efforts to help find it.
Can you talk a little bit about this amazing
project.
-Yeah, so as I was working with archivists
I mentioned this to one of my colleagues here,
Lindsay Holst, who works in the office of
digital strategy for the president and she
and I had already collaborated on something
called the untold stories, so we had done
that work and I mentioned this to Lindsay
and she's like, we need a treasure hunt.
And so we launched this treasure hunt in kind
of a Nicolas Cage style to see if we could
engage everyone.
Yeah so #FindTheSentiments on twitter, and
then whitehouse.gov/find-the-sentiments with
dashes between or just search and find us.
-So speaking of goals, when all of this is
said and done, when you guys decide it's time
to wrap the Declaration of Sentiments search,
whether we've found it or not, like what do
you really hope that people can take away
from this having happened?
-I think that we want, even if we can't find
the physical document, we want the concept
and the knowledge of the document and the
knowledge of it's content.
So many people if you mention Seneca Falls,
they maybe have heard of it, you know that
President Obama often says from Seneca Falls,
to Selma, to Stonewall.
-"That all of us are created equal, is the
star that guides us still, just as it guided
our forbearers through Seneca Falls and Selma
and Stonewall."
-You know, talking about the different moments,
you know weather it's from Philadelphia and
independence all the way through these moments
in our country where we come to work on our
equality and the arc of justice as he says,
as King said.
So our hope is that we get this inclusion
of all of us and the documents like this and
their deep content.
The specific sentiments when you read them
they're so comprehensive and we so are still
working on all of them.
You know are there for us as a vision for
where we want to be.
-So now you know the scoop.
And now is when you get to take action.
So take to social media.
If you know anything about the Declaration
of Sentiments, if you had a relative that
may have been there, or if you know about
some other piece of missing history, get on
social media #FindTheSentiments and share
that information because we all benefit from
a better understanding of our history.
And for more great topics like this, covered
every single day, go to now.howstuffworks.com.
