On 19 July 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton stood behind a wooden podium outside Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. In a trembling voice that eventually steadied, she demanded that women have “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States”.

Stanton read from the Declaration of Sentiments, now remembered as the foundational women’s rights document. Echoing the Declaration of Independence, the document stated: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”

More than a century and a half after the first women’s rights convention was held, Hillary Clinton walked on to the stage at a Brooklyn warehouse, and, hands clasped at her heart, shattered a 240-year-old glass ceiling. Draping herself in the mantle of the women’s rights movement, Clinton credited the work of Stanton and the suffragists for starting the fight that made possible her historic ascent to presumptive nominee of the Democratic party.

“Tonight’s victory is not about one person,” Clinton told the crowd assembled at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, many of them women and girls wiping tears from their eyes. “It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible. In our country, it started right here in New York, a place called Seneca Falls.”