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Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York

Amazon.com Price:  $33.44 (as of 02/05/2019 20:58 PST- Details)

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Description

On a summer day in 1846–two years before the Seneca Falls convention that launched the movement for woman’s rights in the USA–six women in rural upstate New York sat down to put in writing a petition to their state’s constitutional convention, demanding “equal, and civil and political rights with men.” Refusing to invoke the traditional language of deference, motherhood, or Christianity as they made their claim, the ladies even declined to defend their position, asserting that “a self evident truth is sufficiently plain without argument.” Who were these women, Lori Ginzberg asks, and how would possibly their story change the collective memory of the struggle for woman’s rights?

Very few clues remain in regards to the petitioners, but Ginzberg pieces together information from census records, deeds, wills, and newspapers to explore why, at a time when the notion of women as full citizens was once declared unthinkable and thought to be too dangerous to talk about, six abnormal women embraced it as common sense. By weaving their radical local action into the broader narrative of antebellum intellectual life and political identity, Ginzberg brings new light to the story of woman’s rights and of a few women’s sense of themselves as full members of the nation.

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