from participating in the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 because she was a woman. She was the main attraction and one of the organizers of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention. Elizabeth Cady Stanton attended the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention as an observer, accompanying her husband Henry B. Stanton, who had worked as an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society. There she and Mott became friends and vowed to organize a women's rights convention in the United States. Stanton was an organizer of the Seneca Falls Convention and the primary author of its Declaration of Sentiments. Lucy Stone was a pioneering worker for women's rights and an organizer of the first National Women's Rights Convention in 1850. She became a paid representative of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1848 under an arrangement by which she could also lecture on women's rights but without pay. Susan B. Anthony became a paid representative of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1856 with the understanding that she would also continue to campaign for women's rights. Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave and abolitionist leader who played a pivotal role in the Seneca Falls women's rights convention. He and Anthony both lived in Rochester, NY, and were family friends. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper the Black American poet and anti-slavery lecturer Abby Kelley Foster and her husband Stephen Symonds Foster were abolitionists who had encouraged Anthony to become active in the Anti-Slavery Society. Henry Blackwell, who was married to Lucy Stone, worked against slavery and for women's rights. Sojourner Truth, abolitionist and women's-rights activists Sarah Parker Remond, abolitionist and activist for formerly enslaved Black people Background events Although still relatively small, the women's rights movement had grown in the years before the American Civil War, aided by the introduction of women to social activism through the abolitionist movement. The American Anti-Slavery Society, led by William Lloyd Garrison, was particularly encouraging to those who championed women's rights. The planning committee for the first National Women's Rights Convention in October 1850 was formed by people who were attending a convention of the Anti-Slavery Society earlier that year. The women's movement was loosely structured during this period, with legislative campaigns and speaking tours organized by a small group of women acting on personal initiative. An informal coordinating committee organized national women's rights conventions, but there were only a few state associations and no formal