Stanton, Catt, and Mott together on one stamp, marking a century from Seneca Falls to the vote and beyond.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

• Catalog Number: Scott #959

• Denomination: 3 cents (3¢)

• Date of Issue: July 19, 1948

• Printing Method: Rotary Press, Engraved (Intaglio)

• Perforation: 11 × 10½

• Color: Dark Violet

• Subject: Portraits of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Lucretia Mott

• Format: Commemorative single

CONDITION ANALYSIS (Seller-Assessed)

• Status: Used

• Grading: Fine

• Postmark: Two strikes are present. A bold black circular datestamp crosses the right portrait and lower right, with “OCT” and the year clearly legible, indicating an October 1949 date of use. A second, heavier strike falls across the left portrait. The three portraits, anniversary dates, and main inscriptions remain identifiable.

• Obverse: The three oval portraits, the named panels, and the twin 3¢ numerals are all identifiable beneath the postmark.

• Reverse: No original gum present, as expected for a used stamp. The paper shows light toning, with no tears or thinning visible.

• Centering / Margins: The design sits comfortably within the frame, with slight leftward and downward shifts.

• Perforations: Intact on all four sides.

HISTORY

This stamp marks a full century of the American women's rights movement, dated 1848 to 1948, and it anchors that century to a single starting point: the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the first women's rights convention in the United States, where a Declaration of Sentiments demanded equality including the right to vote. The three women shown represent the long arc that followed.

Lucretia Mott, on the right, was a Quaker preacher and abolitionist who helped organize Seneca Falls and gave the early movement moral force. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, on the left, drafted the Declaration of Sentiments and became the movement's leading thinker and writer, arguing for the vote decades before it seemed possible. Carrie Chapman Catt, at center, belongs to the generation that finished the work, leading the National American Woman Suffrage Association through the final push for the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, and then founding the League of Women Voters.

Issued July 19, 1948, in dark violet, on the hundredth anniversary of Seneca Falls, the stamp does something unusual by honoring three reformers together rather than one. It presents the fight for women's rights as a relay across generations, from the women who first dared to demand the vote to the one who helped win it.

STEVEN SAYS

I like that they put all three on one stamp, because it tells the whole story: Mott and Stanton started it at Seneca Falls in 1848, and Catt is the one who finished it, leading the final push that won women the vote in 1920. A hundred years, three women, one relay race. Dated right to that first 1848 convention.