Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker

More than one hundred years after her death, Elizabeth Cady Stanton still stands—along with her close friend Susan B. Anthony—as the major icon of the struggle for women’s suffrage. In spite of this celebrity, Stanton’s intellectual contributions have been largely overshadowed by the focus on her political activities, and she is yet to be recognized as one of the major thinkers of the nineteenth century.
Here, at long last, is a single volume exploring and presenting Stanton’s thoughtful, original, lifelong inquiries into the nature, origins, range, and solutions of women’s subordination. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker reintroduces, contextualizes, and critiques Stanton’s numerous contributions to modern thought. It juxtaposes a selection of Stanton’s own writings, many of them previously unavailable, with eight original essays by prominent historians and social theorists interrogating Stanton’s views on such pressing social issues as religion, marriage, race, the self and community, and her place among leading nineteenth century feminist thinkers. Taken together, these essays and documents reveal the different facets, enduring insights, and fascinating contradictions of the work of one of the great thinkers of the feminist tradition.
Contributors: Barbara Caine, Richard Cándida Smith, Ellen Carol DuBois, Ann D. Gordon, Vivian Gornick, Kathi Kern, Michele Mitchell, and Christine Stansell.

Ellen Carol DuBois is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author and editor of numerous books, including Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage.Smith Richard Cándida :

Richard Cándida Smith is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also serves as director of the Regional Oral History Office. He is the author of Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California and Mallarmé’s Children: Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience.

The editors are, therefore, successful in their aim: like her or not, Stantons ideas should be studied by any serious feminist, historian or student of democracy at large.

Linda K. Kerber,author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship:
It is high time to respect Elizabeth Cady Stanton as a founding thinker and actor in the shaping of American society, politics, and ideas. This fascinating book enriches our understanding by giving us her own most eloquent words accompanied by the wise evaluations of some of our leading historians and writers.

Lynn Sherr:
I picked up this book wondering what, if anything, even these formidable scholars could tell me about Elizabeth Cady Stanton that I hadn't already read. I put it down in awe;with a new appreciation of Stantons brilliance, originality, and complexity as the intellectual genius behind the first wave of feminism. Her 19th century vision resonates for everyone in 21st century America.