Lori D. Ginzberg

Stanton is best known for organizing the first woman's rights convention in Seneca Falls, where she lived, in 1848 along with Lucretia Mott, Jane Hunt, MaryAnn M'clintock and Martha Wright. Although she was not Quaker like the others, she befriended Mott in London at the World Anti-Slavery Convention and was invited to tea when Mott visited her sisters and friends in Waterloo New York. This became the springboard for Stanton's life work, the rights of women in 19th century America.

Ginzberg does an admirable job of fleshing out the life of Stanton, in writing of her complicated relationships and her difficult personality. Ginzberg admits in the foreward that she did not identify with her, revere her or hate her. Damning with faint praise? No. Ginzberg merely lays out the framework of this biography, warning you that if you want the dirt it isn't here; if you want the laudatory bio it isn't here. What you get is a complicated explanation of a complicated woman, one with such a superior mind that she framed her arguments and then moved on. Stanton moved so far beyond suffrage that she often incurred the wrath of her best friend Susan B. Anthony who felt that no other rights could be obtained until suffrage was won. Stanton, like Matilda Gage, believed that organized religions suppressed the rights of women for their own purposes and used the bible to condone it. Stanton rebutted this by writing "The Woman's Bible" , while Gage wrote "Woman, church and state" to belie clerical belief.

If you only read one biography on Stanton, this may not be the one for you. Having read several and having served on the Stanton Foundation in Seneca Falls I felt I had a good foundation of information before reading this book. It is a slight volume and my only complaint is that I would have liked more because there is so much more we could learn about this force of nature.… (meer)