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An American Life
Hill and Wang
September 2010
On Sale: August 31, 2010
272 pages
ISBN: 0374532397
EAN: 9780374532390
Paperback
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Non-Fiction History
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a brilliant
activist-intellectual. That nearly all of her ideas--that
women are entitled to seek an education, to own property, to
get a divorce, and to vote--are now commonplace is in large
part because she worked tirelessly to extend the nation's
promise of radical individualism to women.
In this subtly crafted biography, the historian Lori D.
Ginzberg narrates the life of a woman of great charm,
enormous appetite, and extraordinary intellectual gifts who
turned the limitations placed on women like herself into a
universal philosophy of equal rights. Few could match
Stanton's self-confidence; loving an argument, she rarely
wavered in her assumption that she had won. But she was no
secular saint, and her positions were not always on the side
of the broadest possible conception of justice and social
change. Elitism runs through Stanton's life and thought,
defined most often by class, frequently by race, and always
by intellect. Even her closest friends found her absolutism
both thrilling and exasperating, for Stanton could be an
excellent ally and a bothersome menace, sometimes
simultaneously. At once critical and admiring, Ginzberg
captures Stanton's ambiguous place in the world of reformers
and intellectuals, describes how she changed the world, and
suggests that Stanton left a mixed legacy that continues to
haunt American feminism.
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