The second volume in the six-volume series documenting the accomplishments of the two most famous American suffragists. Featured in Ken Burns's new documentary Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony

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.

Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898

"Dissent and protest have been at the heart of the American story from the first days of settlement to the present day. American Patriots highlights many of the ways that dissent has shaped American history and been a force for progress"--

In her 1855 fictionalized autobiography, Mary Gove Nichols told the story of her emancipation from her first unhappy marriage, during which her husband controlled her body, her labor, and her daughter. Rather than the more familiar metaphor of prostitution, Nichols used adultery to define loveless marriages as a betrayal of the self, a consequence far more serious than the violation of a legal contract. Nichols was not alone. In Unfaithful, Carol Faulkner places this view of adultery at the center of nineteenth-century efforts to redefine marriage as a voluntary relationship in which love alone determined fidelity. After the Revolution, Americans understood adultery as a sin against God and a crime against the people. A betrayal of marriage vows, adultery was a cause for divorce in most states as well as a basis for civil suits. Faulkner depicts an array of nineteenth-century social reformers who challenged the restrictive legal institution of marriage, redefining adultery as a matter of individual choice and love. She traces the beginning of this redefinition of adultery to the evangelical ferment of the 1830s and 1840s, when perfectionists like John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, concluded that marriage obstructed the individual's relationship to God. In the 1840s and 1850s, spiritualist, feminist, and free love critics of marriage fueled a growing debate over adultery and marriage by emphasizing true love and consent. After the Civil War, activists turned the act of adultery into a form of civil disobedience, culminating in Victoria Woodhull's publicly charging the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher with marital infidelity. Unfaithful explores how nineteenth-century reformers mobilized both the metaphor and the act of adultery to redefine marriage between 1830 and 1880 and the ways in which their criticisms of the legal institution contributed to a larger transformation of marital and gender relations that continues to this day.

This book demonstrates the fragility of democratic norms and institutions, and the allure of fascist politics within the Trump era. The chapters consider the antagonistic cultural practices through which divergent political machinations, including white (patriarchal) nationalism, are staged, and examine the corresponding policies and governing practices that threaten the civil rights, security, and wellbeing of racialized minorities, immigrants, women, and gender nonconforming people. The book contributes to social theory on nation-building by delineating processes of exclusion, intimidation, and violence, with a focus on rhetoric, performance, semiotics, music, affectivity, and the power of media. Various chapters also analyze creative, restorative, and at times unruly practices of community building, which reknit the social fabric with expansive visions of the polity. This anthropology-led volume incorporates contributions from a number of disciplines including sociology, American studies, communication, and Spanish, and will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences and humanities.

The first modern biography of one of the nineteenth century's most prominent radical activists, written by an acclaimed senior feminist historian.