Not For Ourselves Alone: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
Several years ago, I read a book called Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
This book tells the story of some of the courageous women who literally fought until the day they died so that you and I (ladies, that is) could have the right to vote. One of my proudest moments was when I gave my copy of this wonderful book to my mom, and after reading it, she told me that she now feels very strongly about not wasting any opportunity to vote.
Pub. Date: October 1999
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Synopsis
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were two heroic women who vastly bettered the lives of a majority of American citizens. For more than fifty years they led the public battle to secure for women the most basic civil rights and helped establish a movement that would revolutionize American society. Yet despite the importance of their work and they impact they made on our history, a century and a half later, they have been almost forgotten.
Stanton and Anthony were close friends, partners, and allies, but judging from their backgrounds they would seem an unlikely pair. Stanton was born into the prominent Livingston clan in New York, grew up wealthy, educated, and sociable, married and had a large family of her own. Anthony, raised in a devout Quaker environment, worked to support herself her whole life, elected to remain single, and devoted herself to progressive causes, initially Temperance, then Abolition. They were nearly total opposites in their personalities and attributes, yet complemented each other’s strengths perfectly. Stanton was a gifted writer and radical thinker, full of fervor and radical ideas but pinned down by her reponsibilities as wife and mother, while Anthony, a tireless and single-minded tactician, was eager for action, undaunted by the terrible difficulties she faced. As Stanton put it, “I forged the thunderbolts, she fired them.”
The relationship between these two extraordinary women and its effect on the development of the suffrage movement are richly depicted by Ward and Burns, and in the accompanying essays by Ellen Carol Dubois, Ann D. Gordon, and Martha Saxton. We also see Stanton and Anthony’s interactions with major figures of the time, from Frederick Douglass and John Brown to Lucretia Mott and Victoria Woodhull. Enhanced by a wonderful array of black-and-white and color illustrations, Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
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 book–the companion volume to the documentary that will appear this fall on PBS–splendidly 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 imagination–as 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.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Author Biography:
Geoffrey C. Ward, historian, screenwriter, and former editor of American Heritage, is the author of ten books, including A First Class Temperament, which won the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 1990 Francis Parkman Prize. He has written for numerous documentary films, including The Civil War, Baseball, and The West, and is currently at work on two books: Jazz: An Illustrated History and A Disposition to Be Rich.
Ken Burns, director and producer of Not for Ourselves Alone, has been making award-winning documentary films for over twenty years. He was director of the landmark PBS series The Civil War and Baseball and executive producer of The West. His work has received or been nominated for Emmy, Oscar, Grammy, and Academy Awards, among others. He is currently producing a series on the history of jazz.
