The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848: A Pivotal Moment in Nineteenth-Century America

This book is part of the “Pivotal Moments in American History” series edited by David Hackett Fischer and James M. McPherson, published by Oxford University Press. The first nine books in the series did not have an explicit focus on women or gender and were all published by men. Sally McMillen astutely suggested that women contributed some pivotal moments in American history; she proposed and wrote a volume on the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and the first wave of the women’s rights movement in American history. Another volume in Oxford’s series of “pivotal moments” might profitably focus on the Nineteenth Amendment and women’s subsequent struggles to serve on juries and to pass an Equal Rights Amendment in the 1920s all the way through to the second wave of the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s.

The book is clearly organized into six chapters: two on the status of women in colonial and antebellum America, one chapter on the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, and two chapters on the following fifty years. McMillen personalizes the topic of the nineteenth-century struggle for women’s rights by focusing on four key leaders of the movement: Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Susan B. Anthony. The author’s claim that she will highlight the lives of these four women is not entirely fulfilled. What she does do is provide brief anecdotes about their childhoods or other moments in their lives as a way to add a more personal touch to her excellent overview of nineteenth-century American women’s history. More problematically, all four women are white. McMillen contrasts their specific childhoods, for instance, to a general account of the childhoods of unnamed female slaves (p. 10). A more profitable approach might have been to feature a fifth woman, such as Frances Watkins Harper, Sojourner Truth, or Harriet Jacobs, who explicitly resisted doubled oppression (by race and sex) in America.

McMillen’s decision to call the four women by their first names throughout the book does not entirely work. In lists of names, it seems jarring and even dismissive to have the four women named so differently, such as: “Lucretia, Abby Kelley, and William Lloyd Garrison” or, more problematically: “Lucretia, Elizabeth, Amy Kirby Post, Douglass, and Mary Ann M’Clintock” (pp. 17, 95). The only man, Frederick Douglass, is not listed by his first last, whereas Mott and Stanton are referred to more informally. Given that this is not a biography of one woman, nor even a joint biographical study, it might have been more effective to refer to all the subjects in the book by their entire or by their last names.

Women’s demands for equality were more radical than any other at the time, McMillen claims, including world peace and antislavery (p. 4). As proof that women’s assertion of full citizenship rights was even more threatening than those made by black men, she points to the fact that it took seventy-two years from the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, whereas black men received the right to vote just after the Civil War.

In her first chapter, on the colonial era through the early nineteenth-McMillen clearly outlines women’s limited legal rights. Marriage and divorce laws were (and are) made at the state level and were governed by William Blackstone’s eighteenth-century interpretation of English common law: “‘the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage’” (p. 19). The married woman, or feme couvert, was metaphorically “covered” by her husband in the eyes of the law. McMillen points out that all four of her subjects learned about women’s legal disabilities as girls and were more aware of these serious limitations than most women at the time.

By the early nineteenth century, the “ideology of separate spheres,” the...