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
Literature knows few champions as ardent and insightful—or as uncompromising—as Gornick, which is to readers’ good fortune.
Gornick’s (The Odd Woman and the City, 2016) ferocious but principled intelligence emanates from each of the essays in this distinctive collection.
Rereading texts, and comparing her most recent perceptions against those of the past, is the linchpin of the book, with the author revisiting such celebrated novels as D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Colette's The Vagabond, Marguerite Duras' The Lover, and Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris. Gornick also explores the history and changing face of Jewish American fiction as expressions of "the other." The author reads more deeply and keenly than most, with perceptions amplified by the perspective of her 84 years. Though she was an avatar of "personal journalism" and a former staff writer for the Village Voice—a publication that “had a muckraking bent which made its writers…sound as if they were routinely holding a gun to society’s head”—here, Gornick mostly subordinates her politics to the power of literature, to the books that have always been her intimates, old friends to whom she could turn time and again. "I read ever and only to feel the power of Life with a capital L," she writes; it shows. The author believes that for those willing to relinquish treasured but outmoded interpretations, rereading over a span of decades can be a journey, sometimes unsettling, toward richer meanings of books that are touchstones of one's life. As always, Gornick reveals as much about herself as about the writers whose works she explores; particularly arresting are her essays on Lawrence and on Natalia Ginzburg. Some may feel she has a tendency to overdramatize, but none will question her intellectual honesty. It is reflected throughout, perhaps nowhere so vividly as in a vignette involving a stay in Israel, where, try as she might, Gornick could not get past the "appalling tribalism of the culture.”
Literature knows few champions as ardent and insightful—or as uncompromising—as Gornick, which is to readers’ good fortune.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-28215-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered...
The inspirational and ultimately redemptive story of a teenage girl’s descent into hell, framed as a parable of faith.
The disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 made national headlines, turning an entire country into a search party; it seemed like something of a miracle when she reappeared, rescued almost by happenstance, nine months later. As the author suggests, it was something of a mystery that her ordeal lasted that long, since there were many times when she was close to being discovered. Her captors, a self-proclaimed religious prophet whose sacraments included alcohol, pornography and promiscuous sex, and his wife and accomplice, jealous of this “second wife” he had taken, weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. In fact, his master plan was for similar kidnappings to give him seven wives in all, though Elizabeth’s abduction was the only successful one. She didn’t write her account for another nine years, at which point she had a more mature perspective on the ordeal, and with what one suspects was considerable assistance from co-author Stewart, who helps frame her story and fill in some gaps. Though the account thankfully spares readers the graphic details, Smart tells of the abuse and degradation she suffered, of the fear for her family’s safety that kept her from escaping and of the faith that fueled her determination to survive. “Anyone who suggests that I became a victim of Stockholm syndrome by developing any feelings of sympathy for my captors simply has no idea what was going on inside my head,” she writes. “I never once—not for a single moment—developed a shred of affection or empathy for either of them….The only thing there ever was was fear.”
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered rather than how she recovered.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04015-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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