Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“DuBois has done a great service to history by redeeming the name of this forceful, sensible and tireless women’s advocate.”—Wall Street Journal

“DuBois has written a usefully ambivalent book, one that looks for a way to reconcile younger writers’ criticisms of Stanton with her own loyalty to the early women’s-rights activists…What emerges is a portrait of Stanton not as a paragon of feminism but as a deeply peculiar person—one whose combination of vision and hubris happened to change history.”—New Yorker

“The life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton still has much to teach us. The invented prisons of race, sex, and class are still with us, but learning about successful past struggles against them can help to equalize the future.”—Gloria Steinem

“DuBois shows that Stanton’s intellectual contributions ranged far beyond the vote.”—Smithsonian

“A major figure deserves a matching biographer, and here, in this book, Elizabeth Cady Stanton has found hers. Out of a mind and spirit rich in knowledge and devotion, Ellen DuBois has fashioned a distinguished biography that secures Stanton’s unique place, once and for all, in the American movement for women’s rights. A pleasure to read.”—Vivian Gornick

“An unpolarized telling of Stanton’s life that reminds readers that heroines are human, complete with honors and blemishes.”—Booklist

“At once critical and empathetic, Ellen DuBois’s biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton revives a leading American intellectual and feminist whose devotion to women’s rights, liberal individualism, and natural law increasingly came into conflict with beliefs in racial and human equality. By exploring Stanton’s intellectual evolution, DuBois reveals much about both the nineteenth-century and modern United States.”—Richard White, author of The Republic for Which It Stands

“DuBois’s Elizabeth Cady Stanton is a must-read biography! This lavish accounting and analysis of one of the most important women in U.S. history and women’s history by one of the nation’s most brilliant historians of women opens up a world of domesticity and activism, as well as personal, social, and national evolution that is a layered revelation to anyone interested in U.S. history. DuBois is a seasoned researcher and excellent writer who brings new insight into the personal life, political growth, and social world of this essential pioneer in women’s rights across many decades of America’s evolution as a nation of many peoples, voices, and struggles.”—Brenda E. Stevenson, University of California, Los Angeles