BREAKING BARRIERS

The influences on American feminists—from Lysistrata to abolitionism, as well as the personal impact of parental strengths and—enhance this multiple biography. Archer involves readers in the drama: Anthony in a court case, Sanger attending a woman injured in a self-induced abortion, Friedan planning a march to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment despite Mayor Lindsay's ban. Each personal history includes sources for the woman's ideas (e.g., Sanger developing the idea of widespread clinics after studying clinics in the Netherlands) and dramatizes the difficulties in establishing precedents for what are now norms (in her fight to make dispensing birth-control information legal, Sanger served eight prison terms). Each section also portrays its subject's larger circle: Stanton and Mott; Debs, Goldman, Darrow; Steinem. Anthony said, ``I love to make history but hate to write it.'' Archer gives the history an exciting flourish; thanks to his protagonists, his audience will come to it better prepared than any of theirs. Bibliography. (Nonfiction. 10+)