Lisa Tetrault has written an important, original book that should generate much fruitful discussion among women's historians. She focuses on a neglected phase of the women's rights movement: the interval between the movement's antebellum origins and the final push for the vote in the Progressive Era. In that period, Tetrault argues, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who had been stymied in their Reconstruction-era hopes to win woman suffrage, made a bid to hold their movement together and claim its leadership by writing its history. Their massive three-volume History of Woman Suffrage, written between 1880 and 1886, put together an origins story, making the 1848 Seneca Falls convention the movement's agreed-upon birthplace. The story Stanton and Anthony chose to tell in the HWS was durable, dynamic, and influential, but also biased, partial, and self-serving. As Stanton and Anthony elaborated the story in speeches and other writings, it served to elevate them over potential rivals for leadership, and it highlighted middle-class white women while neglecting women of color.

For Tetrault a myth is simply “a venerated and celebrated story used to give meaning to the world,” and the idea that the women's movement began at Seneca Falls in 1848 is a “mythological tale,” a story that was “no more ‘true’” than “any other number of possible stories (5, 2). Different origin stories might have centered on the Grimke sisters, for instance; or the First National Woman's Rights Convention in 1850, where Lucy Stone took a leading role and neither Stanton nor Anthony was present. Tetrault argues that many other “possible stories” lost out because Stanton and Anthony promoted Seneca Falls and Seneca Falls promoted them. These two women appreciated the power of collective historical memory, Tetrault argues, because they were witness to contemporaneous struggles over the memory of the Civil War. As David Blight and others have shown, Southerners lost the war but compensated by gaining control of the postwar historical narrative in ways that denied the centrality of slavery and vindicated Southern honor.Footnote ¹ Ex-Confederates created a moonlight-and-magnolias version of Southern history that captured popular opinion and dominated public policy right up through the 1960s. By crafting “the myth of Seneca Falls,” Tetrault argues, Stanton and Anthony asserted the primacy of suffrage against temperance, social purity, or sex radicalism, and they successfully used this origins story to validate their own importance and to impose a tenuous unity on patterns of women's activism that were actually decentralized and diverse.

Tetrault is not afraid to ask big questions, has admirable control of the literature, and writes fluently. Inevitably a few problems of detail creep in, as when Tetrault writes that the Fourteenth Amendment “defined citizenship as ‘male,’” or states flatly that Stanton and Anthony favored educated suffrage (23, 132).Footnote ² But the real significance of the book lies in Tetrault's interpretation. She is, on many points, entirely persuasive, but her analysis also poses intriguing, debatable questions. Does Tetrault's argument handle the awkward fact that Anthony was not actually present at Seneca Falls? Anthony was much more concerned than Stanton to hold on to movement leadership, and yet the story excluded her. Were those other origin stories really just as plausible as Seneca Falls? The National Woman's Rights Convention held in Worcester in 1850, for example, featured an incendiary speech by Abby Kelley Foster denouncing men as the enemy and implying that violent measures might be called for. The extended debate that ensued was not recorded phonographically, and comes down to us only in newspaper coverage, some of which was quite slanted.Footnote ³ Would this divisive episode really have made an effective origins story compared to Seneca Falls, where the Declaration of Sentiments was a rhetorical masterstroke? Perhaps choosing Seneca Falls was self-promotional, but was it not a sensible choice as well?

Tetrault makes a real contribution to “undoing the master narrative” and thereby knocking out some of the last props holding up the paradigm of a unified “first wave” of feminism that stretched all the way from antebellum origins to 1920 (199). But should her readers follow when she goes so far as to deconstruct the idea of the women's movement itself? In a nod to black and working-class women's activism, Tetrault remarks, “There could be no single conception of woman's rights, because, in the words of working woman Jennie Collins, ‘there are not certain wrongs that apply to the whole sex’” (97). The diversity of women's activism strained the fabric of the story Stanton and Anthony chose to tell about a unified suffrage cause, but was not being denied the ballot precisely that—a wrong that applied to the whole female sex?

By portraying Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as ambitious, calculating “politicians” devoted to their own self-promotion, Tetrault turns feminist hagiography upside down (9). But critiquing Stanton and Anthony has been an easy game ever since historians began to look closely at their ugly, racist reactions to the Fifteenth Amendment, and Tetrault's book occasionally contains unfortunate echoes of that old sexist complaint about feminists—smart women with some good ideas, sure, but just too pushy. Readers will have to ponder whether Tetrault has really been able to set aside all the opprobrious connotations of the word “myth.” After all, when historians discuss the Southern “Myth of the Lost Cause,” they emphasize its substantial inaccuracies and malign motives.Footnote ⁴ Tetrault wants to use the word “myth” in a value-free fashion, but sometimes she seems to hint that Stanton and Anthony were mendacious after all. When Tetrault quotes Matilda Joslyn Gage about Anthony's “treachery” (161) without telling us just how much we ought to rely upon Gage's version of events, what are we meant to think? It is not entirely clear. Taken as a whole, The Myth of Seneca Falls does not offer a coherent portrait of Susan B. Anthony, despite all the many angles from which Tetrault discusses her.

Tetrault argues that the “master narrative” of the History of Woman Suffrage was limiting, even damaging, in its whiteness, its middle-class sensibilities, and its focus on suffrage (198). She might have added another indictment: it made women's history boring. By treating the women's movement as the suffrage movement and by treating the victory of woman suffrage as a foregone conclusion, it persuaded many later readers that there was little else to say about this particular phase of women's history. Women's historians crowded into social and cultural history and still have, as a group, surprisingly scant concern with political history. Perhaps Tetrault's focus on this constructed narrative and her argument about its power will help to remedy the situation. In any case, this meaty and challenging book is a most welcome accomplishment.