though the advance of human civilization can be characterized in many different ways, surely none are more appropriate than the march towards personal freedom. From the technologies that have reduced our labors to the philosophies that have opened our eyes to injustice, the last few centuries have seen a great flowering in individual liberty along with the dawn of the great experiment of multiculturalism that is the hope for a peaceful, cooperative future. But though every important indicator, from crime rates to legal rights, is pointed in the right direction, there are still many among us who resist these societal changes, clinging to the old, familiar ways at the expense of the rights of individuals to be whatever they wish to be. Call it traditionalism; call it conservatism. Its name is meaningless next to the damage it does, not just to the reputation of our societies, but to the lives of the minorities crippled by its narrowmindedness. Few works demonstrate the cost of this conservatism better than Sally McMillen's excellent and edifying history of women's suffrage.
But for the last 150 years, the history of the west has been the history of privileged white men. They were the scholars, the lawyers, the judges, and the legislators. They wrote the laws and voted in the elections. They were society. Not until the rise of Mary Wollstonecraft in the mid-eighteenth century did the wider public gain a female voice not born of royalty and even she was marginalized by man's almost complete inability to see, in the masculine, monochromatic nature of his colleagues, a devastating bias towards homogeneity. Privileged man believed himself superior to other forms of humanity. He possessed the sharper intellect that carried him through his schooling and into the work place. Woman was simply too innocent, too soft for his work. And black man, well... He belonged out in the fields, working alongside his brutish brothers.
But with the coming of the nineteenth century, this male dominated world began to crumble. As education began to proliferate through the west, society's marginalized groups began to wonder why they were excluded from society's most vital arenas. The placating words and the patronizing head-pats were no longer sufficient to keep them quiet. For though they were of a different gender, a different color, a different culture, they were still human, capable of reason, of compassion, of intellect.
In America, this inchoate movement coalesced around a handful of key figures who rebelled against the roles society proscribed for them in order to state clearly that they deserved to be equal with the white man. From Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Frederick Douglass, from Susan B. Anthony to Sojourner Truth, this movement gained voices and leaders that resulted in conventions and platforms, in rallies and protests, in newspapers and lobbying. And though their drive for freedom from the expectations of white men would not be realized for nearly 70 years, their tireless advocacy would eventually pay off in the most spectacular expansion of rights in human history, one that far eclipsed even the enlightenment of Ancient Greece. This is their struggle.
As thoroughly researched as it is wonderfully realized, Seneca Falls is a work of history worthy of the extraordinary women it chronicles. Ms. McMillen, who has written extensively on women and the American South, draws upon the writings of the key figures in both the abolitionist and women's rights movements to animate the standardbearers of a most remarkable fight for human equality. Stanton, Anthony, Mott and Stone explode off the page, their deeply divergent personalities realized in a manner that convincingly portrays not only their singular devotion to the cause, but the inevitable sparks and conflicts that arose between them over the leadership of the movement they'd all, in one way or another, given themselves to advance. Their steadfastness in the face of both internal conflicts and the appalling patronization that they suffered from the ruling class is nothing short of an enduring model of how to change the world for the better.
Though Ms. McMillen's ability to capture the movement in all its trials and tribulations is first rate, she also earns plaudits for not shying away from the warts on the characters of the towering figures that propelled the women's rights movement. Elizabeth Stanton's resentful racism is revealed here in shocking detail, so much so that it should put to bed any criticisms of the opinions Abraham Lincoln held at the time. Moreover, the personal disputes that saw the women's rights movement unhelpfully fracture into two rival organizations are also extensively covered, causing the chronicle to be as much a work about the difficulties of minority movements as it is the women's movement itself. For it possessed its absolutists and its collaborators, its fiery speakers and its quiet workers, figures who clashed with one another as often as they did with those set against them.
This is outstanding work that has personality and flow, rivalry and diligence, rage and triumph. It devastates and informs. We can ask for nothing else from a work of history. (5/5 Stars)
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