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

This excellent book is a more significant study than perhaps the title lets on. Tetrault’s goal is not to demonstrate that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—the famed founders of the women’s movement—had feet of clay. They did, but that is hardly the story. Nor is Tetrault particularly intent upon telling the “real” story about the celebrated meeting at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. She does a bit of that, too, but she has bigger fish to fry. The Myth of Seneca Falls is really a study of the science of constructing history, and the significance that accompanied the construction of one iconic narrative. Along the way, Tetrault gives the reader a superb counter-narrative, built upon detailed research and sweeping analysis.

Students of American women’s history are familiar with the crucial institutional story that ran from the 1840s through the end of the century. It is a tale of massive personalities (Stanton, Anthony, Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Victoria Woodhull, George Francis Train, Frederick Douglass, and many others) and—in some cases—prodigious egos. It is also a history of competing organizations, dueling agendas, and a baffling series of meetings and resolutions. There is much inside baseball to be played here. Fascinating folks pursued huge goals and did not always play well together along the way. The meeting at Seneca Falls commonly anchors this narrative, presumably because that gathering makes for an excellent story and yielded the very teachable Declaration of Sentiments. Oh, and there is a nice table that survives from the occasion. Sure, we insiders now know that there were earlier gatherings and the people who met at Seneca Falls were not working within a vacuum. We also know that Susan B. Anthony was not actually there, although that would come as a surprise to many. Tetrault’s slim volume explains how and why it is that we have come to believe what we believe. And it is not simply a matter of fawning hagiography.

The crucial story really begins in the complex political world shortly after the Civil War. As intertwined questions of suffrage and citizenship came to dominate political discourse, advocates for racial and gender equality—historically allies—broke ranks over priorities and strategies. Stanton and Anthony were particularly adamant in resisting efforts to pursue black manhood suffrage at the expense of woman suffrage, and they embraced a national organizational strategy through the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). In those postwar decades the women’s movement divided along multiple axes. Lucy Stone and her Boston-based colleagues in the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) differed with their counterparts in the NWSA on both strategy and personality. Meanwhile, increasingly, state-based organizations and individual actors pursued their own goals and paths, with or without national organization support. It is a complex narrative that Tetrault unravels brilliantly.

On top of this extremely valuable, and wonderfully documented, story of people and events, Tetrault unfolds her central story: the history of Susan B. Anthony as historian. In the postwar moment when various individuals were writing memoirs, veterans were engaged in documenting the “war of the rebellion,” and the American Historical Association was in its earliest days, Anthony—accompanied by Stanton and (for a time) Matilda Joslyn Gage—set about constructing a usable history of the women’s rights movement. The activist-as-historian’s goal was for the past to properly serve the present and the future. That goal pretty much required three things. First, the narrative had to keep suffrage at its center. This made the Declaration of Sentiments signed at Seneca Falls, with its celebrated suffrage plank, a useful starting point. Second, the leaders of the NWSA must be cast as central players. Stanton’s crucial role was easy enough to establish, and although Anthony had not yet met Stanton in 1848 and...