The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 by Lisa Tetrault

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 by Lisa Tetrault Johanna Neuman The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 By Lisa Tetrault. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014, 296 pages, $34.95 Cloth. In unpacking how, when, and why Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony reframed the movement’s history to suit their political needs and personal ambitions, Lisa Tetrault has demonstrated causal connections between events once seen as disparate spasms of individual action. More, in deconstructing the foundational myth that Seneca Falls marked the beginning of the fight for women’s suffrage, she has corrected the historiographical view of the movement’s rightful pioneers. It is a riveting and important contribution to the field, one of interest to librarians, historical societies, scholars, and history enthusiasts. A professor of history at Carnegie-Mellon University, Tetrault makes clear that she is not writing about the events of Seneca Falls but of the origins story shaped in its memory. As she also spells out, she is not using the word “myth” in its commonly understood meaning, as a falsehood, but as “a venerated and celebrated story used to give meaning.” Most strikingly, she does not hold Stanton and Anthony to blame for their racism, their sharp-elbowed ambition, their belittling of rivals. Like David Blight examining Civil War memory, Tetrault excavates the history of events only to ask larger questions about legacy. From the beginning, Tetrault dissects the stories told about the movement’s beginnings. She contests Stanton’s account that she and Lucretia Mott were so outraged by the discrimination toward female delegates at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 that they vowed to organize a woman’s rights convention on their return to the United States. Tetrault consulted Mott’s diary, which suggested first that Mott did not share Stanton’s outrage, having become accustomed to being turned away, and second that the two first hatched plans for a convention a year later, in 1841, “while strolling the streets of Boston.” Tetrault also unearths documentation that Seneca Falls was so little known in its day that delegates to an 1853 women’s rights convention considered authoring a declaration of [End Page 242] rights. “Mott had to tell them such a manifesto had already been written,” writes Tetrault, adding with some irony, “They resoundingly rejected it” (11–16). Much has been written about the rift that divided the women’s suffrage after the Civil War.1 Ellen Carol DuBois famously argued that the Stanton-Anthony split from Lucy Stone and other feminists who supported black enfranchisement was a triumphant moment in the history of women’s rights, an untethering from the abolitionist movement, one that gave the cause of women an autonomous voice.2 Without contesting DuBois, Tetrault observes that much like the myth of Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator or Rosa Parks as a tired seamstress, the myth of Seneca Falls made a stick figure of a movement far more racially and politically diverse than the caricature suggests. In telling the suffrage story, Tetrault locates 1872 as the tipping point, the time the movement might have turned away from the linear strait-jacket of Seneca Falls. In pioneering testimony before the House Judiciary Committee that year, Victoria Woodhull argued that the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments had already granted women the right to vote, and asked Congress to pass a declaratory act affirming this broad interpretation. The resulting trek to the polls by dozens of women—most notably Virginia Minor in Missouri, Mary Ann Shadd Cary in Washington DC, and Susan B. Anthony in New York—ended abruptly in 1875 when the Supreme Court rejected this New Departure, a verdict that the federal government had no right to regulate voting. The decision forced women to pursue suffrage at the state level. But for a few years, there had been a national coalition of various voices—labor activists, pacifists, temperance advocates, even apostles of free love—around the idea of equal rights for women. Tetrault makes clear that if Stanton had stood with Woodhull and Isabella Beecher Hooker...