Seneca Falls Goes Public

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I'VE BEEN WRITING and thinking about Seneca Falls for a few months short of thirty years. I am the author of Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 and Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage, as well as the editor of The Stanton/Anthony Reader. I began my research into the woman suffrage movement in 1969, when I was a second-year graduate student, simultaneously swept up into the earliest stages of feminism's second wave and trying to define my interests and future as a historian. Along with a few apprentice historians my age and even fewer established scholars who encouraged and guided us, we worked to build the neglected field of women's history from almost nothing into what it is now, one of the liveliest, most influential, and most widespread dimensions of historical learning and study in the United States. Now, three decades later, one would be hard pressed to find a university, college, or community college in the U.S. at which women's history isn't taught and taken. Nor has all this information and interest remained confined to the academic. Women's history ideas and perspectives have been brought to bear on popular consciousness about a wide variety of contemporary issues ranging from standards of beauty to women's patterns of employment to sexual behavior and family forms. Women's historians