National Women’s Rights Convention is held in Worcester.

(& 10/24) More than 1,000 delegates from 11 states attend the two-day event in Brinley Hall. The first national women’s rights convention in the U.S., its speakers include Harriot Kezia Hunt, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, and Sojourner Truth, as well as William Ellery Channing, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips, who warns, “[The cause] would meet more immediate and palpable and insulting opposition from women than from men.” The convention meets annually (except for 1857) until 1860.