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

Abstract

The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898, by Lisa Tetrault. Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xiv, 279 pp. $34.95 US (cloth). Beginning with its arresting title, The Myth of Seneca offers a refreshing and much-needed new perspective on the early decades of the US women's suffrage movement. The book tells two intertwined stories: how antebellum activists' broadly conceived women's rights agenda became a more narrowly focused women's suffrage crusade in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, and how Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony created an for their branch of the movement by writing its history, the foundational History of Woman Suffrage. In the process, as Lisa Tetrault convincingly argues, a small, local, and undoubtedly significant 1848 convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, assumed titanic stature for later generations, and Anthony, who had attended neither it nor a second convention held in Rochester shortly afterward acquired historic monumentality as the mother of the suffrage movement. Simultaneously, the grassroots activism of Stanton and Anthony's rivals, particularly that of individuals such as Lucy Stone, who led the American Woman Suffrage Association, largely disappeared from historical just as their archival remains were heavily excised from the History of Woman Suffrage. Remembering and forgetting--the two sides of the coin--receive significant analysis in Tetrault's retelling of the Seneca convention's history. As she demonstrates, the convention and its concerns did not receive much attention in the decades immediately following 1848. Indeed, during those years, few women's rights activists made any effort to identify a single point of origin for their movement. Instead, they acknowledged a number of important forerunners, including abolitionist and anti-slavery meetings and conventions, the lecture tours that speakers such as Angelina Grimke and Lucy Stone had undertaken in the 1830s and 1840s, and the national women's rights conventions that began in 1850. Claims for the importance of the Seneca Convention arose only in the Reconstruction years, as internal conflicts among abolitionists over black male suffrage moved women's lack of the franchise to the top of the list of necessary woman's Then, and only then, as Tetrault clearly delineates, did advocates begin to construct a suffragist memory (p. 113), designating not only the Seneca Convention but also suffrage itself as central elements in an emerging story of women's rights. Gradually forgotten or eclipsed along the way were African American and radical white women's understandings of woman's rights, as well as the concerns of working class women in labour organizations who doubted that the ballot could have the transformative power that suffragists claimed for it. We have known some aspects of this story, especially the bruising battles among abolitionists over whether to support ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and their outcome in producing two competing woman suffrage groups. Tetrault's signal achievement is to trace the process whereby Stanton and Anthony constructed a suffrage-focused historical that grew more convincing and powerful over the decades. Through carefully delineating the development of commemorative practices, Tetrault shows how the two women elevated the Seneca event to mythic status. The meeting at Seneca [began to] become the myth of Seneca Falls (p. …