Publisher's Weekly Review
This lively, succinct overview of the five activists most responsible for securing the vote for American women is a welcome, intellectually sophisticated addition to feminist history. Baker, a respected historian at Goucher College, presents five interconnected critical biographical essays on Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Willard and Alice Paul. Baker's effortless blending of personal narrative with political and historical analysis-a technique she perfected in her groundbreaking 1987 Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography-works to great effect, not only vividly brings these women to life but explicating the complicated social and political framework in which they existed. For instance, she traces Frances Willard's evangelical feminist style and interests to her devotion to her mother and to her father's calling to be a minister during the Second Great Awakening. Baker knows a good story, such as the highly respectable Stanton's friendship with notorious free-lover Victoria Woodhull; Baker highlights both the story's drama and historical significance. While she doesn't ignore complex themes-such as the thorny relationship suffrage organizing had to the enfranchisement of African-American men-she often downplays them. Still, Baker has written a popular (yet scrupulously footnoted), smart and compelling book. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Public work, private lives: a thoughtful portrait of five women's-rights pioneers. Baker (History/Goucher Coll.; The Stevensons, 1996, etc.) is right to suggest that our view of the suffragists is gray and one-dimensional: "We conflate them into one middle-class overweight white woman with a severe look, hair unflatteringly pulled behind her ears, dressed in a high-necked black dress with a lace collar and cameo pin for decoration." In fact, she observes, the early feminists were a diverse lot, though with some commonalities--many, for instance, had suffered at the hands of fathers or husbands and therefore understood firsthand the injustices wrought on women by virtue of mere gender. Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Willard and Alice Paul, each of whom Baker considers indispensable to the women's movement, were quite different, each possessing a different reason for advocating women's right to vote: Stanton wished to advance women's rights generally, for example, while her ally Anthony paid closer attention to the rights of working women. Baker carefully traces the origins of these various emphases while linking them to episodes in the leaders' lives: Stone, foremost a champion of women's education, attended college against her father's wishes; it took her nine years to save enough to pay a year's tuition, but her success there swayed her father to lend her money for the next year. Anthony, no stranger to "same-sex passion," and Stanton, married for 47 years, forged an alliance of ideas and activism while finding reasons to disagree on many points. And Willard campaigned vigorously not only for women's rights but also for "sexual purity" and temperance, motivated by the death of a brother to alcoholism and the certainty that women who smoked and danced could have no self-respect. A lucid account that humanizes historical figures hitherto rolled up into a single image. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
This fascinating collective biography features in-depth sketches of five indispensable leaders of the American suffrage movement. Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Willard, and Alice Paul--stalwarts in the struggle to extend fundamental rights and freedoms to females--are profiled in turn. Although these women are identified with the famous movements they founded and the radical causes they espoused, Baker breathes new life into subjects that have become somewhat fossilized and sanitized over time. Viewing them through a revitalized historical lens, she concentrates on the private lives and personal connections that contributed to the formation of their staunch beliefs and ambitions. The fact that they each led lives that were influenced by childhood circumstances, divergent personalities, robust love interests, bitter disagreements, powerful friendships, incredible triumphs, and overwhelming tragedies is significant to understanding the ebb and flow of the movement they were responsible for keeping afloat for well over half a century. --Margaret Flanagan Copyright 2005 Booklist
Library Journal Review
It took 80 years for a group of determined women to win suffrage for American women. In this group biography, Baker details how the personal was definitely political in the lives of five leaders of this movement. (LJ 9/1/05) (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
