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Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Hardcover – October 19, 1999
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Stanton and Anthony were close friends, partners, and allies, but judging from their backgrounds they would seem an unlikely pair. Stanton was born into the prominent Livingston clan in New York, grew up wealthy, educated, and sociable, married and had a large family of her own. Anthony, raised in a devout Quaker environment, worked to support herself her whole life, elected to remain single, and devoted herself to progressive causes, initially Temperance, then Abolition. They were nearly total opposites in their personalities and attributes, yet complemented each other's strengths perfectly. Stanton was a gifted writer and radical thinker, full of fervor and radical ideas but pinned down by her reponsibilities as wife and mother, while Anthony, a tireless and single-minded tactician, was eager for action, undaunted by the terrible difficulties she faced. As Stanton put it, "I forged the thunderbolts, she fired them."
The relationship between these two extraordinary women and its effect on the development of the suffrage movement are richly depicted by Ward and Burns, and in the accompanying essays by Ellen Carol Dubois, Ann D. Gordon, and Martha Saxton. We also see Stanton and Anthony's interactions with major figures of the time, from Frederick Douglass and John Brown to Lucretia Mott and Victoria Woodhull. Enhanced by a wonderful array of black-and-white and color illustrations, Not For Ourselves Alone is a vivid and inspiring portrait of two of the most fascinating, and important, characters in American history.
- Print length256 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherKnopf
- Publication dateOctober 19, 1999
- Dimensions7.5 x 0.75 x 10.5 inches
- ISBN-100375405607
- ISBN-13978-0375405600
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We little dreamed when we began this contest, optimistic with the hope and buoyancy of youth, that half a century later we would be compelled to leave the finish of the battle to another generation of women. But our hearts are filled with joy to know that they enter upon this task equipped with a college education, with business experience, with the fully admitted right to speak in public--all of which were denied to women fifty years ago. They have practically but one point to gain--the suffrage; we had all.
Anthony and Stanton had worked together for over half a century for women's rights and were instrumental in keeping the movement alive despite repeated defeats. Sadly, Anthony is best remembered as "the woman on that funny dollar" and Stanton has been largely forgotten. PBS favorites Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward have joined forces again to change all that, in their respectful dual biography of the great suffragettes, Not for Ourselves Alone. The authors trace Anthony and Stanton's very different lives--Anthony was a Quaker who remained single all her life; Stanton was born to a wealthy family and later married and raised several children--from girlhood on through their hard work, frequent disagreements on policy, and unflagging devotion to the cause of women's rights. In this era when fewer than half the eligible voters go to the polls, many have forgotten the struggles of Anthony and Stanton, the sacrifices they made, and the hardships they endured. Anthony, for one, was frequently vilified in the press, cruelly caricatured, and shouted down at lectures. What shines most brightly throughout the volume, however, is the love and respect these women felt for one another.
With contributions by noted historians Ann D. Gordon and Ellen Carol Dubois, and dozens of evocative contemporary photographs, Not for Ourselves Alone provides a view of the suffrage movement through the eyes of the women who fought hardest for it. "We are sowing winter wheat," Stanton confided to her diary, "which the coming spring will see sprout and which other hands than ours will reap and enjoy." Indeed, neither Stanton nor Anthony lived to be able to cast a ballot. But Burns and Ward have assured them of a larger place in the American memory--as is their right. --Sunny Delaney
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
-AEleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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From the Inside Flap
Stanton and Anthony were close friends, partners, and allies, but judging from their backgrounds they would seem an unlikely pair. Stanton was born into the prominent Livingston clan in New York, grew up wealthy, educated, and sociable, married and had a large family of her own. Anthony, raised in a devout Quaker environment, worked to support herself her whole life, elected to remain single, and devoted herself to progressive causes, initially Temperance, then Abolition. They were nearly total opposites in their personalities and attributes, yet complement
About the Author
Ken Burns, director and producer of Not for Ourselves Alone, has been making award-winning documentary films for over twenty years. He was director of the landmark PBS series The Civil War and Baseball and executive producer of The West. His work has received or been nominated for Emmy, Oscar, Grammy, and Academy Awards, among others. He is currently producing a series on the history of jazz.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The women who crowded the sidewalk, pushed their way into the lobby, and began to move toward their seats in the lofty, glittering interior -- more than three thousand of them, along with only a handful of men -- had not turned out merely to hear music. They had come to attend a historic event, a great "Reunion of Pioneers and Friends of Woman's Progress," and the boxes that framed the stage in front of them were festooned with flowers and banners belonging to women's organizations: the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, in white with gold letters; the Professional Woman's League, all in gold; the Woman's Press Club, in violet, yellow, and white; the Republican Woman's Club, in patriotic red, white, and blue. At center stage stood three ornately carved chairs, the back and arms of each wound with red roses. Behind the chair in the center was a vast oval of white chrysanthemums with the name Stanton picked out in crimson immortelles.
It was the eightieth birthday of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the woman who had launched the women's-rights movement in 1848 and had helped lead it ever since. Its celebration was to be the central theme of the evening, and when four sisters named Parke began playing a cornet fanfare and the guest of honor started to make her stately way onstage, a diminutive but corpulent figure in black, leaning on a cane with one hand and clinging with the other to the arm of her son Theodore, the entire audience rose to flutter handkerchiefs in tribute. Stanton was nearly blind now and very frail, but as she carefully took her seat and composed herself amid the flowers, one woman in the crowd thought she looked, "with her majestic face crowned with its beautiful white hair, like a queen upon her throne."
The official hostess for the evening sat at Stanton's left: Mrs. Mary Lowe Dickinson was president of the Woman's National Council of the United States, which claimed 700,000 members all across the country. But sitting at Stanton's right hand, as she had sat for better than forty years, was her close friend and strongest ally, Susan B. Anthony. She was herself seventy-five years old that fall but still routinely working harder than women half her age. In the first seven months of the year alone she had traveled to thirteen states to speak. Then, while addressing a crowd at Lakeside, Ohio, in late July, she had collapsed onstage with what may have been a small stroke -- "the whole of me coming to a sudden standstill," she remembered, "like a clap of thunder under a clear sky." She was the best-known woman in America, and as she recuperated, reporters from all over the country kept a death watch outside the house; one Chicago paper telegraphed its man on the scene: "50,000 words if still living, no limit if dead." Anthony had chafed under the enforced rest -- "do-nothingness," she called it -- and it had taken her nearly three months to get back on her feet. But onstage at the Metropolitan Opera House, she now seemed to one reporter "as erect and alert as ever" as, one by one, younger women, many of whom she had helped train for leadership, rose to recount the progress that women had made in the fields of religion, education, and philanthropy since she and Stanton had begun their work.
The birthday celebration for her old friend had been Anthony's brainchild, but she had been careful to remain behind the scenes until now -- not wanting the evening to seem merely "a mutual admiration affair," she said -- and the National American Woman Suffrage Association, of which she was president, was just one of several sponsors. But the symbolism of seeing the two trailblazers sitting side by side was not lost on the audience. "Together they have trodden the flinty stones," said a message from Clara Barton; "together they opened the way for all womanhood through all time."
The two women could not have been more different. Stanton had been born to wealth and comfort, and was for many years the housebound mother of seven. She was witty and hospitable, fond of good food and fine clothes, an enthusiastic devotee of afternoon naps.
But she was also an uncompromising revolutionary -- a "many idead woman," her daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch proudly called her -- for whom winning the vote was always just one item on a comprehensive agenda aimed at improving the status of all women in every area of life.
Anthony was a Quaker farmer's daughter who had chosen early not to marry; alone among the earliest advocates of woman suffrage, she had remained self-supporting all her life. She was plainspoken, disciplined, single-minded, but she had learned to be a canny tactician as well, willing to tack to the left or to the right if by so doing she could steer the woman-suffrage movement closer to its goal. Though she never held public office and would not live to cast a legal vote, she had already become the nation's first great woman politician, "Aunt Susan" to a whole generation of young women.
Stanton herself had once tried to explain the nature of their partnership. "I am the better writer," she said, "[and] she the better critic. She supplied the facts and statistics, I the philosophy and rhetoric, and together we have made arguments that have stood unshaken by the storms of . . . long years; arguments that no man has answered. Our speeches may be considered the united product of our two brains. So entirely one are we that . . . not one feeling of envy or jealousy has ever shadowed our lives."Their arguments had indeed proved unassailable, and they had determined early on that they should always stand together: "To the world we always seem to agree and uniformly reflect each other," Stanton wrote. "Like husband and wife, each has the feeling that we must have no differences in public." But behind the scenes, the real story was more complicated -- and more interesting -- filled with instances of love and loyalty, envy and betrayal; raising larger questions of principle and compromise, means and ends, and the meaning of independence itself.
Finally, it was time to hear from the guest of honor. Mrs. Dickinson introduced her as "the Mother of the heart-life stirring in us all." The crowd rose once again, a sea of waving handkerchiefs. Only Stanton's obvious frailty returned them to their seats; no one wanted to force her to stand too long.
Women in the front rows saw that there were tears in her eyes. "I thank you all very much for the tributes of love, respect, and gratitude," she said, her rich voice penetrating to the farthest balcony. "I am well aware that these demonstrations are not so much tributes to me as an individual as to the great idea that I represent -- the enfranchisement of women."
She was too weak to remain on her feet, she said. A younger colleague would read her remarks for her. She started for her chair, then turned to the audience again, a smile playing across her lips: "Before I sit down I want to say one word to the men who are present. I fear you think the 'new woman' is going to wipe you off the planet, but be not afraid. All who have mothers, sisters, wives or sweethearts will be very well looked after."
Then she sat and listened along with the audience as her words were read aloud. While she was never one to discourage praise and had heard precious little of it in recent years, she was too impatient to bask in it for long. Nor did she want to waste valuable time saying predictable things about votes for women, the cause with which she'd been most clearly identified since 1848: the vote was coming, she was sure, though she would not live to see it. "I cannot work in the same old ruts any longer," she'd recently told a friend. "I have said all I have to say on the subject of suffrage." And she saw little point in further belaboring the discredited notion that women must confine themselves to "woman's sphere" -- being daughters and wives and mothers and nothing else. "That ground," she wrote, "has been traveled over so often there is not a single tree nor flower nor blade of grass to be found anywhere."
For Elizabeth Cady Stanton there was always more interesting, more important work to do, and even on this self-consciously sentimental occasion, meant to bring women of many opinions together, she could not resist challenging her listeners. If women were to continue on the path of progress, she said, Christianity itself needed to be reformed:
Nothing that has ever emanated from the brain of man is too sacred to be revised and corrected. Our National Constitution has been amended fifteen times, our English system of jurisprudence has been essentially modified in the interest of woman to keep pace with advancing civilization. And now the time has come to amend and modify the canon laws, prayer-books, liturgies and Bibles. . . . Woman's imperative duty at this hour is to demand a thorough revision of creeds and codes, Scriptures and constitutions.
Anthony sat quietly as Stanton's words were read out to the increasingly restive audience. She was privately disappointed that Stanton had not rested her case "after describing the wonderful advances made in state, church, society and home, instead of going on to single out the church and declare it to be especially slow in accepting the doctr...
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf; First Edition (October 19, 1999)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0375405607
- ISBN-13 : 978-0375405600
- Item Weight : 2.05 pounds
- Dimensions : 7.5 x 0.75 x 10.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #948,715 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,790 in Women in History
- #4,658 in Political Leader Biographies
- #10,514 in Women's Biographies
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Ken Burns has been making documentary films for almost forty years. Since the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including The Civil War; Baseball; Jazz, Statue of Liberty; Huey Long; Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery; Frank Lloyd Wright; Mark Twain; Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson; The War; The National Parks: America’s Best Idea; The Roosevelts: An Intimate History; and, most recently, Jackie Robinson.
Future projects include films on the Vietnam War, the history of country music, Ernest Hemingway, and the history of stand-up comedy.
Ken’s films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including fourteen Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards and two Oscar nominations; and in September of 2008, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Ken was honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
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I hope for someday a religion where religions that subjugate their daughters from birth have no power. Judaism, Christianity and Islamic male supremacist ideology will not exist. It is my greatest hope and at least some of my dreams are based on these courageous women's lives. Anthony knew she would not see the vote in her lifetime, but she worked until her death for us, so I am inspired. You know, I saw on a so-called liberal doc the other day where someone said that there is proof that educated women are less inclined to have large families. In the next breath he said that there is a chance that we will make humanity extinct, implying if we're not all breeding we will become extinct and that we should not educate women. First of all , we have never been more populated and population is a problem in terms of overpopulation not underpopulation. (Caveat - their plan is to breed large families and take over - so they do have a vested interest in making sure we never reproduce. Both white supremacist and male supremacists have this plan for their "armies.") It's a difficult issue.
Just know that this kind of ideology is out there - along with taking the vote away from women believe it or not and if you knew them, like I do, you would be afraid. There are large groups that hate women, and women are taught that it's god's will to hate other women, to take away their liberty and dignity and have them behave as dogs - submissive and obedient, but "loved" like a dog. Many of these girls do not get out. Their lives destroyed and only the least threatening and most trained allowed to speak in public. Many do not have access to free information in carefully controlled propaganda groups, or any escape from their religion of birth. If you are a women's rights advocate always remember because you are free does not mean that millions of children aren't being raised in groups that do not allow them minds of their own or choices for liberty. They're stuck there and starving for love and education - or even basic dignity, liberty and respect. The religions often use propaganda and threats to keep them in the group. Many sects marry you against your will, use you for breeding for their male supremacist armies and you are not allowed to believe that you can say no to that culture. Your mind, by the time you are an adult is carefully constructed to do what they say - or you will be pressured, ostracized and often threatened with violence, loss of love, family or harm. I know this very well. Fighting back is difficult because they have a system of image, psyche and propaganda warfare to keep you subjected to men.. Cady was just the beginning of a movement that recognizes religion as a genuine weapon against women. I would add all systems of propaganda to that list. I think we should take it very, very seriously.
There are many interesting facts in this book (if you get a genuine version of it - if you are targeted on a list you make get a "special" book if you know what I mean.) Rich men with money or their trained people target certain people to get special information - much of it rewritten for their own agendas. This may or may not be good, depending on who they are. But Christians might give you a false copy with their own propaganda. If you get a good version of it, there will be info on the women's rights movement and all the drama and courage of the ladies involved. They were fighting for a radical notion - that of liberty for half the population, the right to participate in our own governing, instead of living as serfs or slaves in a system that does not benefit us. The right to seek your own good or pursue happiness as they say. You have the right to power as much as you can get it. The right to every good, including health care, education, love, liberty, your own mind and your own choices within the boundaries of respect for other gentle, respectful people - the right to kindness and goodness. You have a right not to sacrifice your children and to live where you are not attacked or harmed. You have a right to protect animals and children from harm. A society that does not protect it's most vulnerable members is a society of tyrants. You have a right to fight for yourselves and your concerns if there are those who seek to take them from you. These first revolutionaries can teach you about heart muscle. Get out there and fight for those who cannot fight or do not even know that they deserve to be fought for.
Lots of pictures, too.