Seneca Falls is a sleepy little town with a quaint downtown of old buildings, and the typical economic struggles of declining industry and stagnant population, nestled in the beauty of northwestern New York.

It’s hard to picture it as a hotbed of revolt, but Seneca Falls — the falls were obliterated when locks were put on the river — is a touchstone for anyone interested in the women’s rights movement.

It was the site of the first women’s rights convention, the home of key women’s rights agitator Elizabeth Cady Stanton for 16 years, and the town where Mrs. Stanton met Susan B. Anthony.

New York percolated with the abolitionist and temperance movements — there was overlap in personnel of the two movements — so the ground was plowed for a seed to be planted for women’s rights.

But it took the moving to the Locust Hill section of town of Mrs. Stanton, her husband, Henry B., and their three children — four others were born while they lived there — in 1847 to make the seed sprout.

The Stantons had lived in Boston, where Mrs. Stanton enjoyed the intellectual fruits of hearing, meeting and observing leading lights in literature, theology, law, music, theater and social concerns, including temperance, prison reform, abolition and peace.

“I had never lived in such an enthusiastically literary and reform latitude before, and my mental powers were kept at the highest tension,” Mrs. Stanton said in her autobiography, “Eighty Years and More.”

The daughter of a judge, Mrs. Stanton’s mind was sharpened by listening to her father discuss cases with clients, and debating him and his students and colleagues on legal issues, particularly concerning the strangulating laws that pertained to women.

She also developed a strict work ethic, based on her goal of proving to her father that he should be as proud of her as he would be of any son. It was a goal she never reached.

In her autobiography, Mrs. Stanton recalled that, at age 11, the last of her four brothers died. This occurred at a time when all of a family’s hopes and expectations rested on their sons. Women could not vote, could not own property after they married, had few occupational options, and were not even allowed to speak in public. A woman’s role was to get married, bear children, run the house, and be subject to her husband’s rule.

On a day shortly after the boy died — he had not even been buried yet — Judge Daniel Cady said, “Oh, my daughter, I wish you were a boy.”

Mrs. Stanton said she told her father, “I will try to be all my brother was,” and she strove to develop herself in what were considered boy’s pursuits — learning and horsemanship.

Judge Cady never accepted his daughter’s goals, but the work ethic and desire to change the world had stuck in her.

In addition to her intellectual fulfillment in Boston, Mrs. Stanton was blessed with good servants. With able help, she enjoyed cleaning clothes, managing expenses, choosing her children’s clothes and setting the table for meals. She considered her domestic chores to be a creative outlet.

While she returned to New York — the state of her birth and pre-married life — to lobby for a married woman’s property bill, her life in Boston was “rich,” said Miriam Gurko in “The Ladies of Seneca Falls.”