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.