Abstract

Addressed to General Readers Faye E. Dudden (bio) Sally G. McMillen. Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. x + 236 pp. Illustrations, notes, appendices, and index. $28.00. Lori D. Ginzberg. Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009. 196 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $25.00. When historians write partly or primarily for general readers or for undergraduate course adoption, we may find the format constraining, though it can be empowering as well. Sally McMillen's Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement was written for the "Pivotal Moments in American History" series, edited by James McPherson and David Hackett Fischer and published by Oxford University Press. The series reaches out to general readers with engaging narratives, and its framework of "pivotal moments" puts a premium on historical contingency. "Pivotal Moments" is well suited to dramatic episodes like Washington crossing the Delaware, or the Union army turning back Lee's invasion of Maryland at Antietam, when concentrated events—especially military events—changed the course of history. Women's history, however, has usually been viewed through the lens of social and cultural history, where change is less concentrated or dramatic. McMillen tells us frankly how she came to write within this unlikely framework: in a casual conversation with one of the editors, she asked about titles and was surprised at what she did not hear in his response. "But you have nothing on women!" she objected, and James McPherson responded, "Do you have any ideas?" McMillen named Seneca Falls "as a start," whereupon she was asked to write this book (p. 7). It is impossible not to sympathize with McMillen's impulsive comment, but one suspects she may have found herself regretting it, because the constraints of the series bear heavily upon her. She argues that the actions of a few women in Seneca Falls in July 1848 "unleashed a social revolution and inaugurated the women's movement," and she fashions her narrative around the stories of "four remarkable women": Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone. Surely McMillen understands that much recent [End Page 307] scholarship has tended to "decenter" the origins of the women's movement and downgrade the iconic founding mothers by positing a more diffuse and "untidy" origins story. But to fit into the "pivotal moments" framework, she was practically obliged to make large, overreaching claims for Seneca Falls and the foremothers. Because the series addresses general readers or introductory-level students who are presumed to know nothing about the subject or the period, McMillen must patiently explain everything. Thus when William Lloyd Garrison enters the story, she pauses for a substantial paragraph of biography; ditto for Frederick Douglass. Writing as a popularizer and a synthesizer rather than a researcher, McMillen draws upon previous publications, perhaps most notably Judith Wellman's The Road to Seneca Falls.1 Specialists may not learn much that is new, although we can appreciate her deft summaries and felicitous choices about what to include. For example, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's childish rebellion against gender roles is told not only through the familiar tale of how she intended to take scissors to her father's law books, but also illustrated with an unfamiliar story about a moment of schoolroom rebellion: when asked to read a saccharine verse, "The Wife," Elizabeth Cady burst into angry tears, threw the book aside, and ran out of the room (p. 5). Historians may regret some of the choices McMillen made to reach her presumed audience. For example, her decision to refer to her key women by first name was probably intended to make the story more accessible, but the result is a story in which "Lucretia" and "Elizabeth" interact with "Garrison" and "Douglass." Historians may also question the need for pedagogical commentary when the story reveals Stanton's elitist assumptions about race and class. For example, when discussing the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, which included a line charging that man had withheld from woman "rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreign," McMillen comments: "From...

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