Publisher's Weekly Review
When Paul Barnes suggested that Elizabeth Cady Stanton be included in the film portraits of notable Americans that Ken Burns was planning to make, Burns barely recognized the name. Marginally more familiar was that of Susan B. Anthony, Stanton's comrade-in-arms in the struggle for women's suffrage. But as this bookÄthe companion volume to the documentary that will appear this fall on PBSÄsplendidly reveals, theirs is the story not merely of two remarkable 19th-century women but of a major political movement, the end of which has yet to be written. This dual biography of the pair by the historian Ward emphasizes the impossibility of treating either one in isolation from the other. Anthony's grasp of the practical complemented Stanton's philosophical imaginationÄas Stanton wrote, "entirely one are we." Ward restores Stanton to her proper place alongside Anthony in the history of the women's movement and sensitively handles the more problematic elements of their political positions, especially in regard to their resistance to the enfranchisement of former male slaves before the vote was extended to women of any color. Additionally, there are essays by prominent women historians, including a provocative discussion of Stanton's contemporary reputation by Ellen Carol DuBois, and the wealth of illustrations that we have come to expect from Burns and his associates. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A look at the friendship of two extraordinary women, leaders of the first wave of feminism, which produced women's suffrage. Designed as the companion to a Burns (television's The Civil War, Baseball) and Ward (The West, 1996, etc.) film scheduled for a fall showing on PBS, this volume focuses on the remarkable 50-year partnership between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. It was Stanton who launched the fight for women's rights with the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls, N.Y., and Anthony who focused on getting the vote as the issue that would give women the most leverage in gaining the economic, religious, legal, and moral independence espoused in the now famous document. Stanton, a dumpling of a woman with seven children, supplied ``the philosophy and rhetoric''; Anthony, angular and a so-called spinster all her life, the ``facts and statistics.'' Together, with many others, including Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone, and Frederick Douglass, they fought year after year, speech after speech, polemic after polemic to free American women from subjugation to the fathers, husbands, and sons in their lives. Some of the battles were ugly: although the first wave of feminism was closely allied with abolition (and also temperance), both Stanton and Anthony opposed the 15th Amendment giving newly freed black men the vote, asserting that women (i.e., educated white women) deserved it more. Both Stanton and Anthony spent years criss-crossing the country, giving speeches urging women to free themselves from male domination, Anthony pounding on the issue of suffrage, Stanton on what would later be called consciousness-raising. They died years short of the 1920 constitutional amendment that would give women the vote, but they left behind women like Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul, who would push it through. Heads up for those who think the women's movement started with a bra burning in Atlantic City. (150 color and b&w photos) (Book-of-the-Month/History Book club selection)
Booklist Review
Ward and Burns, writers of the illustrated histories The Civil War (1992) and Baseball (1994), both of which were published as companions to PBS series, now pair up in an evocative dual biography of the two women who, for all intents and purposes, made the women's rights movement in the latter portion of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth. Ward and Burns' latest pictorial history, also a companion to an upcoming PBS series, boasts text that is as inviting and edifying as the many exciting illustrations the two writers and filmmakers have selected. As given witness here, Stanton and Anthony differed greatly in their personalities, and they experienced far different lives before their tandem leadership of the women's movement. And yet, they remained friends to the last. (Sadly and ironically, neither woman lived long enough to be able to taste the fruit of their ultimate victory, the establishment of the right of females to vote). One was married with children, the other was not, and they came to hear the call through different channels, but their 50-year affiliation, which in itself encapsulates the history of women's rights in the nineteenth century, wrought, as the authors see it, "the largest social transformation in American history." Pretty strong words! But this finely presented overview of Stanton and Anthony's lives only serves to support such a claim. --Brad Hooper
Library Journal Review
Ward and Burns are at it again, producing a PBS film (airing this fall) on two dauntless crusaders for women's rights as well as this companion volume. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.