Brings to life a complex woman whose place in the history of women’s rights has been somewhat overshadowed by that of her...
A well-documented, well-balanced account of the life of “the founding philosopher of the American movement for woman’s rights.”
Ginzberg (History and Women’s Studies/Penn State Univ.; Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York, 2005, etc.) offers a full-length portrait of a brilliant, confident, assertive woman for whom raising seven children was no bar to remarkable activism in the cause of women’s rights. The author shows us Stanton in her many roles: child, wife, mother, author and campaigner. At the International Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, Stanton was outraged to discover that women were not allowed to participate. Eight years later, in Seneca Falls, N.Y., she helped organize the first women's-rights convention. Stanton drafted the convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, which was modeled on the United States Declaration of Independence and proclaimed that men and women are created equal. For years she and Susan B. Anthony collaborated, with Stanton primarily writing and Anthony traveling and speaking. After the Civil War, the two women broke with their former colleagues, the abolitionists, and lobbied against granting African-American men the right to vote, with Stanton arguing that the votes of educated women were needed to offset those of former slaves. Ginzberg notes that the image this created of the woman’s suffrage movement as primarily concerned with the rights of middle-class white women was not entirely false. When her children were older, Stanton traveled extensively on the lecture circuit, where she campaigned vigorously for the property rights of married women, for equal guardianship of children and for liberalized divorce laws. Deploring the position of women within organized Christianity, she wrote The Woman’s Bible to correct the sexism she found in scripture. Despite her flaws of elitism and racism, Stanton, Ginzberg argues, used her powerful intellect and her persuasive prose to challenge the nation to see women as full citizens.
Brings to life a complex woman whose place in the history of women’s rights has been somewhat overshadowed by that of her colleague Susan B. Anthony.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9493-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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