In July 1848 about three hundred people met for two days in the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, and heard a Declaration of Sentiments that declared, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal." The meeting had been called on short notice by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and a few of their friends, and many of the newspapers that noticed it treated it with ridicule. Yet it opened a campaign that would outlast nearly everyone who attended. Women spoke, petitioned, organized, marched and went to jail, and they won the vote state by state in the West long before they won it nationally. Seventy-two years later, in August 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment gave American women the vote.National Photo Company Collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsThe people who fought that long campaign wrote a great deal, and they knew they were making history. The library holds much of what they left: their own six-volume history, memoirs and biographies of the leaders, the protest a couple read at their wedding, an account of the women jailed for picketing the White House, the voice of the militant British movement, photographs of the marches, and a novel about a woman won over to the cause. It also holds the essays and cartoons of those who argued against votes for women, for the opponents were organized, articulate and, for many years, successful. Together these works show a movement that changed over seven decades, from parlor meetings and petitions to parades and picket lines, with the arguments on both sides set down as people made them at the time.