The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman's Rights Convention (review)

Book Reviews61 TheRoad to SenecaFalls: Elizabeth CadyStanton andtheFirst Woman 's Rights Convention. By Judith Wellman. Urbana: University of Illionois Press, 2004, xii + 297 pp. Map, illustrations, notes, and index. Cloth, $55; paper, $25. Judith Wellman has done an excellent job presenting the larger context as well as the actual events ofthe first Woman's Rights Convention, held at Seneca Falls in July 1848. It is a carefully researched and nuanced narrative. The author weaves together biographies of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her extended family and others, with political, economic, and social history ofthe "burned over district" ofNew York, especially Seneca Falls. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a connector. In the female roles of friend and relative, she brought together networks of political abolitionists and Free Soilers, legal reformers, and radical Quakers. Wellman traces the connections and influence ofLucretia Mott's views of "practical religion" on Stanton, and on the reform movement in general. She also describes the contribution of Friends such as Abby Kelley, Martha Wright, and the Hunt, M'Clintock, Pryor, Post, and Hallowell families. Wellman answers the questions "why Seneca Falls?" and "why July 1848?" The town was at the center of the industrial, demographic, religious , and cultural revolutions shaking the ante-bellum nation. Its waterfalls provided power for new industries that attracted diverse populations of labor and entrepreneurs. It exemplified the tensions between older communal, family, hierarchical relations and new individualism; between wealth and position based on land and the new industrial-based wealth; between hierarchical churches and acknowledging that each individual could connect with the divine. Abby Kelley's radical lectures in Seneca Falls in 1 843 opened the possibility for serious attention to the questions of women's rights in 1848. Providing power to the ferment were underlying arguments about the nature of citizenship. How was the ideal of the Declaration of Independence to be realized in terms of race and gender? While most agreed that slavery was wrong, there was wide disagreement on how it might be ended. While by 1836 most agreed that a married woman should have the right to own and control property, there was wide disagreement over how to allow this. Ifwomen could own property and be taxed on it, could they be denied the vote? If African-Americans were free, owned property, and were taxed, could they be denied the vote? The logic was clear, but opposed by politics and emotion. Ofspecial interest to Quaker historians is the context Wellman provides 62Quaker History for the split in Genesee Yearly Meeting when 200 Friends walked out and formed the Congregational Quakers. Their statements sound very much like some Friends today who do not want anything to do with hierarchy, ministers, elders, or select meetings. In the context ofthe heated abolitionist /Free Soil/women's rights arguments of the 1840s, the Quaker leadership seemed to offer very little, particularly in terms of real spiritual nourishment. The question for each generation, it seems, is how to live out the radical call of discipleship in the thorny, controversial issues of the day—and do it under God's guidance, in community. Martha Paxson GrundyCleveland Heights, Ohio "These Strange Criminals ": An Anthology ofPrison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War. Ed. by Peter Brock. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, xviii + 505 pp. Notes and bibliography. Cloth, $75; paper, $45. This anthology included the prison experiences ofthirty-one war resistere from World War I to the Cold War and in seven different countries. It is edited by the dean of peace historians, Peter Brock, who was himself imprisoned in England during the first World War. Most of the material was mined fromunpublished or privately published memoirs though some, like Donald Wetzel's Pacifist, are excerpts from previously published accounts. Seven of the memoirs are by Quaker pacifists, most from England during the first World War. Others are from a variety of religious and philosophical backgrounds. There is great variety in these accounts, yet their reactions to the prison environment are remarkably similar. The impact ofbeing isolated from society in an institutional setting designed to humiliate and depersonalize inmates seems universal. Though all of these young war resisters were political prisoners...