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Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 10:12:11 -0500 From: H-Net Staff <revhelp@mail.h-net.msu.edu> Subject: H-Net Review Publication: 'America's Premier Feminist: Elizabeth Cady Stanton' Lori D. Ginzberg. Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life. New York Hill and Wang, 2009. 272 pp. $25.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8090-9493-6. Reviewed by Sally McMillen (Davidson College) Published on H-SHEAR (February, 2010) Commissioned by Brian Luskey America's Premier Feminist: Elizabeth Cady Stanton In this compelling, well-written biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, historian Lori D. Ginzberg reveals a woman who loomed larger than life, a woman of enormous complexity, brilliance, determination, and an elevated sense of self. Here, in addition to acquiring an understanding of this early feminist, we also gain deeper insight into the nineteenth-century women's rights movement and why it was so protracted and defined by dramatic, often unpredictable outcomes. Stanton seemed to be at the heart of many of its most controversial moments, at times inspiring and at other times annoying both supporters and friends. This readable, brief account is written with confidence and solid analysis. Because so few sources covering Stanton's early years and personal life are extant, Ginzberg sometimes speculates about what might have been, but does so judiciously--how, for instance, Stanton might have felt about the family's slave, Peter; how she and husband Henry got along or did not get along; and how Stanton related to her seven children, some of whom undoubtedly disappointed her. Born into a family of privilege in upstate New York, Stanton never shed the elitist ideas that so often affected her outlook and writings. Ginzberg spends some time examining Stanton's growing discontent with women's oppression and her path to the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. Though never a major participant in the antislavery movement, Stanton found its messages inspiring. Often home alone due to husband Henry's commitment to politics and abolition, Stanton felt she understood how domestic and maternal responsibilities entrapped women. At the same time, she often expressed joy in rearing her rambunctious children, approaching those duties with verve and confidence--and always on her terms. Yet her energy and bright mind demanded more, which became especially apparent when the family moved to Seneca Falls, New York, in 1847. A year later, she found that outlet by helping to organize the nation's first major women's rights convention. The women's movement had begun, but interestingly, without Stanton's presence for several years. She did not attend a single annual national women's rights convention until 1860. But she kept her mind active and her commitment alive by writing letters to attendees, insisting that women end their dependence on and subordination to men. After meeting Susan B. Anthony in 1851, she found a courier for her bold ideas. Enjoying the limelight, Stanton was fearless in publicly expressing her radical opinions. That bothered her not a whit. She was outspokenly racist when, during the post-Civil War years, Congress moved ahead and gave black men citizenship and the right to vote. Stanton was furious, believing that educated white women should have access to the ballot box before uneducated former male slaves and immigrants could vote. Ginzberg reveals Stanton's distaste for orthodox religion, which she saw as a major cause of female subordination. In 1895, she created her own version of the Bible, appropriately named _The Woman's Bible_, comprised of two volumes that emphasized women's triumphs and eliminated scripture that depicted their subjugation. Even fellow suffragists were startled by the publication, and they voted Stanton out of the National American Woman's Suffrage Association, the very organization she had helped to found. In many ways, Stanton was a woman ahead of her time. She saw suffrage as a means to end women's oppression: if women gained political power, men would have to consider women's needs as well as their own. Unlike many female reformers, Stanton pursued a broad agenda. She felt that any law that confined women to a secondary status virtually kept them in a cage, beholden to men and lacking the ability to act on their own. Her most profound belief, and one that she articulated so beautifully in "Solitude of Self," an essay she delivered to Congress, was the importance of self-sovereignty--that women needed to be able to survive and stand on their own. The most obvious comparison of Ginzberg's biography is to Elisabeth Griffith's _In Her Own Right_, published more than two decades ago in 1984. While few new facts appear here, Ginzberg is more critical of her subject. She obviously admires this gutsy woman, but she takes her to task for her elitist, racist views expressed openly during the early years of Reconstruction. No doubt Stanton's statements are more jarring to readers today than they were to many Americans in the nineteenth century. Ginzberg gives less attention to Stanton's role in dividing the women's movement when she and Anthony hastily formed the National Woman's Suffrage Association in 1869. Invariably believing she was right, Stanton broke away from those who disagreed with her but then gave little thought to picking up the pieces. That duty she left to Anthony, her partner in reform. There is no doubt that Stanton filled every room she entered. Nor did she suffer fools gladly. At the end of her life, wanting to narrate a correct picture of herself, she wrote her memoir, a frustrating volume for any historian since Stanton had a poor memory for dates and details and ignored controversies and negative moments from her past. She, Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage also compiled a history of the women's movement, which, as Ginzberg points out, was heavily influenced by its three editors. The volumes included the documents and women they most admired and initially excluded people and events in their rival organization, the American Woman's Suffrage Association. Stanton would probably delight in this depiction of herself, despite the book's honest revelations. Ginzberg's biography should find a wide audience. It will appeal to students but also to readers who relish biographies and women's history. Stanton, a brilliant, annoying, delightful, and charming woman, was at the heart of a transcendent movement. American women owe her so much. Citation: Sally McMillen. Review of Ginzberg, Lori D., _Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life_. H-SHEAR, H-Net Reviews. February, 2010. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25694 <https://outlook.cuit.columbia.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25694> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2010 12:55:04 -0500 From: H-SHEAR Editor Peter Knupfer <repub@MAIL.H-NET.MSU.EDU> Subject: H-SHEAR Review Session: Ginzberg replies to McMillen Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 10:23:01 -0500 Message-ID: <ec58e141002020723o1aad51b2pf69d2751242a582e@mail.gmail.com> Subject: H-SHEAR Review Session: Ginzberg replies to McMillen From: Brian Luskey <bpluskey@gmail.com> [Ed. note: Lori Ginzberg's message is a reply to Sally McMillen's review: see http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=25694 <https://outlook.cuit.columbia.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=25694> ]. I want to thank Sally McMillen for her gracious review of my book, _Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life_. I was delighted that she so enthusiastically entered the spirit in which I hoped to address Stanton's life and legacy: as a lively, brilliant, charismatic, and deeply important leader of American thought and action who was, like all compelling characters, flawed and problematic. I also want to thank H-SHEAR for the opportunity to do here what I loved most in writing this book: engage in an ongoing conversation about how we approach those "great figures" in our past, how we balance our admiration with discomfort and disagreement, and, most importantly, how we assess their legacies to our own lives and society. (I suppose I owe special thanks for inviting me to this discussion, since so little of Stanton's life was actually _in_ the "early Republic"!) Sally McMillen, in comparing my biography of Stanton to Elisabeth Griffith's 1982 biography, notes correctly that I am "more critical" of my subject; I am also, of course, the beneficiary of nearly three decades of writing about women's history, scholarship that was invaluable to my analysis of the nineteenth century and of Stanton herself. Certainly that scholarship has profoundly influenced my own views of Stanton, especially of the significance of her racist pronouncements during the campaign for a Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution that would grant suffrage to black men but not to women. It is here, McMillen notes, that my interpretation of Stanton's life and legacy departs most sharply from previous ones. In highlighting Stanton's elitism and racism as consistent, and intellectually significant, threads in her life, I am indeed harder on Stanton than previous biographers and, perhaps, McMillen herself, might prefer. And surely McMillen is correct that Stanton's ugly expressions of racial prejudice "are more jarring to readers today" than they were in her own time, though this is a transformation for which we have decades of hard struggle against virulent and violent racism, not our own good sense, to thank. Still, as I argue in the book, Stanton's racism reflected more than distressing slips, but were closely tied to her commitment to what I term "stand-alone feminism;" her impact on American society and American feminism was shaped in part by this relationship, and it is this legacy I hope to complicate. I tangle with this legacy often and openly in my classroom. I have a joint appointment in History and Women's Studies so, in addition to my courses in history, I teach undergraduates about feminist theory. There I talk with my (predominantly white) students about how gender identities, the material conditions of women's lives, and feminism itself are complicated and mediated by race and class. They enthusiastically embrace this notion when we read black feminist thought: from Anna Julia Cooper's 1892 _Voice from the South_, to the Combahee River Collective Statement, to Kimberle Crenshaw's work on intersectionality, or Dorothy Robert's _Killing the Black Body_, they are perfectly willing to criticize white women's claim to reflect and represent "womanhood" itself. They begin to grasp, I hope, the idea (which I have addressed, more or less explicitly, in my scholarly writings) that white, middle-class women's identities are as complicated by race, class, ethnicity, nation, and religion as are those of women of color, poor women, non-Christians and so on - that, in fact, the notion of gender as a separate, "stand-alone," identity is one way that white, middle-class Americans have historically shaped and obscured their own class and racial interests. But when we talk about Elizabeth Cady Stanton (or Mary Wollstonecraft or Betty Friedan) they forget. The idea that what many Americans consider "feminism" is itself flawed by the implicit assumption that any one group - nearly always a dominant, privileged one - can serve as the exemplar of womanhood turns out to be harder to support than it sounds. The argument that the "choices" white women make - about their wage earning, about childcare, about which reproductive rights need the most protection, about sexuality - may actually exist because other women have fewer options is a difficult one to hold onto. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, they continue to insist, for all our theoretical critiques, shaped and represented a feminism that rose above such concerns, that transcended such "group" identities as class, race, and religion merely by declaring its own experience and vision a universal one. Closely related to this conversation is my effort, at which I have been a spectacular failure, to convince my students that our ideas about individualism and choice and opportunity are also, always, historical concepts. For them, all rights and responsibilities inhere in individuals, in choices made one person at a time, and they often resist, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton did, the notion that group or community interests might sometimes trump individuals' rights. To them, talk of group rights, or group wrongs, is practically un-American; it detracts from, in their view (and Stanton's) the purest feminism, one based on an individual's free and autonomous movement through the world. But Stanton's worship of the individual and her rights also made her unable to hear of group concerns that could make those rights empty or irrelevant. It is a measure of Stanton's success that her ideas, so radical in her own time, are so much part of the air we breathe that my students have difficulty recognizing them as radical at all; they are so logically, so unquestionably, at the heart of our notions of individual rights. But for all her greatness and charisma and achievement, Stanton's inability to think beyond her own experience as the exemplar or model of womanhood itself is a legacy, and a loss, that limits us still. Again, thanks so much to Sally McMillen and H-SHEAR for this opportunity. I look forward to continuing this conversation. Lori D. Ginzberg Pennsylvania State University
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