This report contains addresses by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Samuel J. May, C.C. Burleigh, Frances D. Gage, Lucretia Mott, Parker Pillsbury, Ernestine Rose, Henry Ward Beecher, Sojourner Truth, and Charles Lenox Redmond. Some speeches discuss the relationship of woman suffrage to black manhood suffrage and the reasons for enfranchising women. It also includes the constitution of the Equal Rights Association, and correspondence from various individuals.
This book studies male activists in American feminism from the 1830s to the late 19th century, using archival work on personal papers as well as public sources to demonstrate their diverse and often contradictory advocacy of women’s rights, as important but also cumbersome allies. Focussing mainly on nine men—William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, James Mott, Frederick Douglass, Henry B. Blackwell, Stephen S. Foster, Henry Ward Beecher, Robert Purvis, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the book demonstrates how their interactions influenced debates within and outside the movement, marriages and friendships as well as the evolution of (self-)definitions of masculinity throughout the 19th century. Re-evaluating the historical evolution of feminisms as movements for and by women, as well as the meanings of identity politics before and after the Civil War, this is a crucial text for the history of both American feminisms and American politics and society. This is an important scholarly intervention that would be of interest to scholars in the fields of gender history, women’s history, gender studies and modern American history.
Did the history of human rights begin decades, centuries or even millennia ago? What constitutes this history? And what can we really learn from 'the textbook narrative' - the unilinear, forward-looking tale of progress and inevitable triumph authored primarily by Western philosophers, politicians and activists? Does such a distinguishable entity as 'the history of human rights' even exist, or are efforts to read evidence in past events of the later 'evolution' of human rights mere ideology? This book explores these questions through a collective effort by scholars of history, law, theology and anthropology. Rather than entities with an absolute, predefined 'essence', this book conceptualizes human rights as open-ended and ambiguous. It taps into recent 'revisionist' debates and asks: what do we really know of the history of human rights?
In a quiet town of Seneca Falls, New York, over the course of two days in July, 1848, a small group of women and men, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, held a convention that would launch the woman's rights movement and change the course of history. The implications of that remarkable convention would be felt around the world and indeed are still being felt today. In Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Woman's Rights Movement, the latest contribution to Oxford's acclaimed Pivotal Moments in American History series, Sally McMillen unpacks, for the first time, the full significance of that revolutionary convention and the enormous changes it produced. The book covers 50 years of women's activism, from 1840-1890, focusing on four extraordinary figures--Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Susan B. Anthony. McMillen tells the stories of their lives, how they came to take up the cause of women's rights, the astonishing advances they made during their lifetimes, and the lasting and transformative effects of the work they did. At the convention they asserted full equality with men, argued for greater legal rights, greater professional and education opportunities, and the right to vote--ideas considered wildly radical at the time. Indeed, looking back at the convention two years later, Anthony called it "the grandest and greatest reform of all time--and destined to be thus regarded by the future historian." In this lively and warmly written study, Sally McMillen may well be the future historian Anthony was hoping to find. A vibrant portrait of a major turning point in American women's history, and in human history, this book is essential reading for anyone wishing to fully understand the origins of the woman's rights movement.
