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The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898
Overview
The story of how the women's rights movement began at the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 is a cherished American myth. The standard account credits founders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott with defining and then leading the campaign for women's suffrage. In her provocative new history, Lisa Tetrault demonstrates that Stanton, Anthony, and their peers gradually created and popularized this origins story during the second half of the nineteenth century in response to internal movement dynamics as well as the racial politics of memory after the Civil War. The founding mythology that coalesced in their speeches and writingsmost notably Stanton and Anthony's History of Woman Suffrageprovided younger activists with the vital resource of a usable past for the ongoing struggle, and it helped consolidate Stanton and Anthony's leadership against challenges from the grassroots and rival suffragists.As Tetrault shows, while this mythology has narrowed our understanding of the early efforts to champion women's rights, the myth of Seneca Falls itself became an influential factor in the suffrage movement. And along the way, its authors amassed the first archive of feminism and literally invented the modern discipline of women's history.2015 Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize, Organization of American Historians
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Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781469633503 |
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Publisher: | The University of North Carolina Press |
Publication date: | 02/01/2017 |
Series: | Gender and American Culture |
Edition description: | Reprint |
Pages: | 296 |
Sales rank: | 537,374 |
Product dimensions: | 9.20(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Lisa Tetrault is associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University.
Table of Contents
The story of how the women's rights movement began at the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 is a cherished American myth. The standard account credits founders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott with defining and then leading the campaign for women's suffrage. In her provocative new history, Lisa Tetrault demonstrates that Stanton, Anthony, and their peers gradually created and popularized this origins story during the second half of the nineteenth century in response to internal movement dynamics as well as the racial politics of memory after the Civil War.
What People are Saying About This
Tetrault examines how the history and memory of women's suffrage was created by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, as well as their legions of accomplices over time. She makes the convincing case that an archival approach to this 'construction' of a canonized memory will show us how an origins myth rooted in the narrative of Seneca Falls has hovered over the story and reputation of women's suffrage ever since Stanton and Anthony wrote their History. How and why Stanton and Anthony created their own myth of leadership as well as the progress narrative of their movement is a splendid case for how the politics of memory works in history.David Blight, Yale University
A clear, well-written, and vivid account. Tetrault's arguments about the ways that any movementin this case the woman suffrage movementshapes its future course by re-imagining its past will provide substantive grist for discussion. Tetrault's characterization of the battle over memory in the woman suffrage movement will help readers to see the 'founding mothers' of American feminism in a complex and revealing light. Since, as she notes, they have tended to be memorialized in public school curricula and public history sites in the heroic light they themselves framed, this discussion will be revelatory."Annelise Orleck, author of Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965