Eloise Wilkin – author, illustrator and doll designer

During the Gulf War it was said that folks were sitting down to watch the children’s television show, Mr. Roberts’ Neighborhood, with their children. It was comforting to watch a placid program that could be counted on to just give calm, soothing sounds, sights and welcoming words and simple ideas of family and friendship.

Now, again we are inundated with our ‘way-of-the-world’ news. Sometimes it is just too much to take in and process. We have to turn off the TV news. You are lucky if you have a child close by in your life. Pick up a Little Golden Book and give yourself and the child a rest from the chaos of the world. And if you don’t have a little one around go ahead anyway and look through some of the most wonderful stories and illustrations of childhood.

Illustrators like Garth Williams of the Little House on The Prairie books wrote and illustrated for Little Golden Books, as did hundreds of others. Richard Scarry, Gustaf Tenggren and many more contributed to the essence of these little books.

My favorite was The Taxi That Hurried, written just a year after WWII when people again wanted peace in their lives. It is a cheery little book about a taxi in a busy city. But, then I did love my brother’s copy of The Animals of Farmer Jones with the cows and the chickens and the ducks. The last page was ripped out but I didn’t care.

Steve Santi, has written several definitive collector’s identifications and value guides on the Little Golden Books. I have the 1989 issue that has The Poky Little Puppy on the cover. There have been several new editions since. His web site is a delight and well worth your visit. http://www.thesantis.com/home.htm

Now as an adult, I realize the importance of these books in our lives. And I seem to think of the books several times lately. I turn off the television and forgo reading the headlines. I look through Santi’s book and remember.

I remember my mother reading about The New Baby, and Good Morning, Good Night illustrated by Eloise Wilkin. I wanted to find out more about this woman who wrote and illustrated more than 100 books in her lifetime.

And as did Tasha Tudor, Eloise Wilkin spread her creative talents into other venues. She designed a baby doll for Vogue Dolls that has been listed as one of their most favored dolls. It has the same characteristics that her book children have; rounded cheeks, bright eyes filled with trust and wonderment. I found one of these dolls on E-bay and bought the Baby Dear doll for a fair price to go along with the So Big book I had just received from a bookseller in Hawaii. Why? What will I do with it? I don’t know – I will probably just put it on a shelf in my office. When I tire of listing Chilton manuals into my inventory, I can glance up and see the doll and the book that take me back to a quieter time, a less tiresome life.

The books command prices from ten to several hundred dollars in very good condition. The Eloise Wilkin Treasury; a delightful book filled with the artists’ cherubic faces and sweet stories, favorite nursery rhymes, prayers, and poems is currently at $60.00 to $75.00.

What kind of a woman wrote and illustrated these famous old stories still popular and important in the book collector world?

Born in Rochester, New York in 1904, Eloise Burns became an illustrator after graduating from The Rochester Institute of Technology. Little is know of her early life but she was fortunate to have had a mother who seemed to be a free spirit and encouraged her children to enjoy their creative gifts. One fine day she allowed them to draw all over one wall in their house just before redecorating. Imagine the squeals and happy scribbles that day.

After she graduated, Eloise and her friend Joan Esley, another illustrator, moved to New York City where they decided they had a better chance of success in the world of illustration. They would later corroborate on several children’s books.

Eloise Burns became Eloise Burns Wilkin in 1935 after her marriage to Sydney Wilkin and soon began a family of four children. She illustrated over 20 books with her sister Ester, who also married a Wilkin.

In 1943, she was offered a contract with Simon & Schuster in New York. She signed to do four Little Golden books a year staying with Little Golden Books exclusively until 1961, then only occasionally doing a book for them up until the mid-eighties.

On October 4, 1987, at the age of 84, Eloise died of cancer in Brighton, New York, bringing an end to a beautiful and fulfilling career and leaving a legacy of delightful stories and pictures still loved by 21st century children and the folks who read to them. At the time of her death Eloise Wilkin was still illustrating and working on a new doll design.

#authors #collecting

Neglected Treasures – Overlooked writers and books

Part of the fun of being a bookseller is the never-ending opportunity to learn more about books and writers. I consider myself especially fortunate as a seller of used books to have such a wide world of material from which to choose. Walk into a new bookstore and you know pretty much what you can expect to see. But walk into a used bookstore and you never know what you might run into. In a used bookstore you may find a book heretofore unknown to you, a book published 10, 20, or 100 years ago, a book that turns out to be, somehow, the very thing you were seeking — you just didn’t know that when you walked in the door.

Secondhand shops are repositories of potential discovery and rediscovery, of rescue and rehabilitation. Books never embraced by a wide reading audience are still available on these shelves, still waiting for appreciative readers, as are the books — once celebrated — which have been declared unfashionable, booted from the pantheon, and now virtually unread.

Why does one book recede from the public’s memory while another remains in print year after year, continues to be assigned in literature courses and recommended by critics? What is the confluence of influence that produces lasting fame for some writers and some books, but not for others of equal literary merit? There are many reasons.

The fickle fashions of critical and popular taste do have their effects on literature, just as they have on other forms of culture. The vicissitudes of the publishing industry, which itself has undergone a sea-change in the past few decades, obviously affect what is in print and therefore readily available to the reading public. Small press books can have a tough time getting noticed, and even large publishers don’t promote all their titles with equal energy.

Some books never receive serious attention because they have been pigeonholed into a category (be it mystery, fantasy, or “women’s fiction”) that has historically been a bit snubbed by the critical establishment. Jane Austen even had a rough hoe of it for a while, because her subjects didn’t seem “large” enough to some.

Occasionally a terrific first book will appear which, unfortunately, never achieves much of an audience and the writer, due either to lack of encouragement or early death, does not go on to develop a body of work with enough cumulative impact to keep his or her name in the public’s (and publisher’s) eye.

On the other hand, and more happily, there is from time to time a resurgence of interest in writers formerly consigned to the dustbin. For example, witness how Dawn Powell became a critical darling long years after her death in 1965. Now, many years after Gore Vidal, in an essay intended to spur interest in his old friend’s work, declared that “… her name has been erased from that perpetually foggy pane, ‘American Literature”,she is readily available in two volumes of the Library of America series. She has, it appears, come into her own at last.

From time to time brave publishing ventures pop up, such as the Lost American Fiction series published by Southern Illinois University Press, and Virago’s heroic efforts to reissue books by women writers. So some deserving titles get put back into print — at least temporarily.

In any case, it cannot be denied that many worthy books get buried in the sands of time. Even though some do eventually re-emerge, most remain six feet under. Where there had once been an eager, large audience, now there is little interest. And where once there was at least a little interest, well, now there is next to none. There will always be books waiting to be discovered or rediscovered — either by the critical establishment, or simply by readers and collectors who rescue them, one by one, from dusty shelves.

And so we arrive back at the perfect place to look for books worthy of a second chance — the secondhand bookshop, where almost anything might eventually wind up, including many wonderful books waiting patiently for the right person to pluck them from the shelves, blow away the dust, and discover the glories to be found within their faded covers.

The fact that my own shop can give good books another shot at an audience, and thereby become a small part of the ongoing work of reclaiming lost and neglected books, is one of the most satisfying parts of my job. I should stress that this is definitely a two-way street, and that I have learned at least as much from my customers over the years as they have ever learned from me. I cannot count the number of conversations I’ve had that began with a simple purchase or inquiry and went on to excited bursts of “Oh, but have you read so and so? You must!” and “If you like this sort of thing, you have a treat in store — this writer is right up your alley!”

I’ve chosen for this essay a few writers I, myself, am rather fond of who I think have been undeservedly a bit lost in the shuffle and who deserve a wider audience of readers and collectors. Since this is my essay, I get to pick — but I’m sure that everyone reading this has his or her own share of recommendations. In fact, I would be delighted to hear them!

Since I’ve been talking about finding unanticipated delight within faded covers, perhaps it’s appropriate that I draw this batch of neglected books from literature which, similarly, takes as its subject the complexities found lurking behind unprepossessing exteriors and the intrigues behind what is, at first glance, the stuff of ordinary, everyday life.

I offer here a few “neglected” writers who have written intensely and expressively about “ordinary” lives.

The British writer Celia Fremlin is usually shelved in the “mystery” section, but her books are not so easily classifiable. She chooses as settings for her novels scenes of unremarkable domesticity; then bit-by-bit these familiar territories turn, well, strange. Crying babies, quarreling couples, anxious children, eccentric landladies and lodgers who are a bit odd … these are the characters who populate Fremlin’s small, but irresistibly creepy, universe. As the distinguished writer Ruth Rendell has written, “Celia Fremlin’s ‘mysteries’ … concern ordinary people, usually in conventional domestic relationships, living in suburbs or provincial towns, who are brought under pressure from some kind of appalling stress … Identification of her characters is very easily made … partly because the awful situations her people get themselves trapped in, the tedium of running a home, the stress of never having quite enough money to live comfortably, the nagging demands of small children, the pressures of a boring or unsuitable job, are familiar to most of us at some time or another through personal experience.” ** Fremlin is a prolific writer with a long career, but is an example of one whose work has been lost to a larger audience because of the relegation of her work to a particular genre ghetto. If her works were not automatically categorized as “mystery: women’s soft-boiled division,” she might at last achieve a larger audience.

Ernest Raymond was a prolific writer of English family life and character, and he might be considered a bit of a sentimentalist today. But I think at least his 1935 work We the Accuseddeserves a wider readership. The story of “a totally unremarkable man,” it is, in fact, based on the real story of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen and is convincing in its portrayal of the desperate longings that can lie behind the everyday life of an apparently humdrum fellow. By its end this inconsequential man has become both monster and tragic figure, driven to an appalling deed but still, somehow, sympathetic for all that. It is a work of extraordinary power and compassion.

Tess Slesinger is an example of a promising young writer who died far before her time. But still, she left a novel and several remarkable short stories that deserve continued recognition. In her stories, particularly, she addresses a range of issues (from marital woes to writer’s block to life as a department store clerk) with wit and style, and not a little compassion. Her wry humor, social consciousness, and attention to the details that make up women’s lives make her work seem very contemporary to the modern sensibility. It’s a shame that she left such a small body of work, but at least we do have that.

Slowly, By Thy Hand Unfurled

In Romulus Linney we have the case of someone who has achieved quite a bit of success as an Off-Broadway playwright (and father of the actress Laura Linney), but whose early novel, Slowly, By Thy Hand Unfurled, remains relatively obscure. This is a strange and disturbing work, written in the form of a journal by an uneducated, almost illiterate woman in an unspecified small town, in an indeterminate earlier time. As she struggles for expression in the limited language available to her, the reader becomes increasingly able to read between the lines and into the heart of this woman’s repressed emotional life: her self-delusion, self-absorption, her pain, and her real but stifled impulse to love. It’s fascinating how Linney, who as a playwright must have honed his abilities to listen well, seems in this work to have gone straight through language and out the other side.

These writers don’t need exotic locales or femmes fatales to produce works with a great emotional range, to produce sentences to make your hair stand on end, or to provide a compassionate world-view from a very small setting. All they need is the ordinary human heart, and ordinary human emotions — sometimes under extraordinary stress, to be sure, or in extraordinary need. And like the unprepossessing display of books in the secondhand shop, these works — like many others — may well deserve a second look.

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* Vidal’s essay originally appeared in The New York Review of Books, November 5, 1987. It has been reprinted in the omnibus collection of his essays United States, published by Random House in 1993.

** Rendell’s remarks are taken from the terrific book, Writer’s Choice, published in 1983 by Reston Publishing Company. Writer’s Choice is a collection of recommendations by well-known writers of works of both fiction and nonfiction. A wonderful starting point for finding buried literary treasure, not to mention the fun of seeing what writers one’s own favorite authors recommend.

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Notes on Authors Cited: Celia Fremlin’s many novels of suspense include The Hours Before Dawn(1958); The Trouble Makers(1963); The Jealous One(1965); With No Crying(1980); and Listening in the Dusk(1990).

The novels of Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962) include Craven House(1926); Twenty-Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935); Hangover Square(1941); and The Slaves of Solitude (1947).

Romulus Linney published Slowly, By Thy Hand Unfurledin 1965. Also of interest is his first novel, Heathen Valley(1962), which has to do with sin and salvation in 19th century North Carolina.

Ernest Raymond (1888-1974) had an unusually long writing life. Sixteen of his novels constitute “A London Gallery,” intended as a portrait of half a century of London life. We, the Accused(1935) is part of this ambitious enterprise. Other novels include To the Wood No More(1954) and The Chalice and the Sword (1952).

Tess Slesinger (1905-1945) left behind the novel The Unpossessed(1934) and the story collection Time: The Present(1935; reprinted in 1971as On Being Told That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover, and Other Stories), as well as several screenplays (including a co-writing credit for the 1945 film, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”).

#collecting

Neglected Americana: The Woman’s Rights Movement

Relics of revolutions are avidly collected— uniforms, bullets, swords, guns, and propaganda, are carefully preserved. Until recently, however, relics of one of the most sweeping revolutions, the social revolution in women’s rights that culminated in the suffrage struggles of the early twentieth century, gathered dust or were discarded. As interest in the feminist movement has increased, so has interest in its collectibles. In the following article, the first of two or more articles dealing chronologically with the suffrage movement, I’ve tried to cover the most important events of the movement between 1848 and 1873, fill in a little background and refer to the most important books and collectible ephemera of that period.

Susan B. Anthony House

Thirty years ago, the home of Susan B. Anthony in Rochester, NY was rarely open to the public, barely maintained by the contributions of a few dedicated volunteers, and almost entirely unknown to Rochesterians. Thanks to recent interest in the history of the women’s rights movement, it’s now much expanded, open to the public, fully staffed, and a favorite site for visiting politicians’ press conferences. I became a docent there about ten years ago and have found myself increasingly absorbed in the history of the women’s movement—much of which happened here, in upstate New York. Books and ephemera inscribed and/or published by Anthony, as well as other suffrage items turn up here with some frequency. Or, at least, they used to. They are now much scarcer.

The suffrage movement was a battle fought and won largely with words—with mountains of paper and hours of speeches at meetings and conventions, with lobbying, and with banners and sashes, pins, handbills and posters. According to historian Andrea Kerr Moore, the American Women Suffrage Association “sent out almost 216,000 leaflets from its Boston headquarters” in one year. Even during the most “violent” period of the suffrage movement, the early 20th century, when militants marched, chained themselves to the White House fence, and were jailed and force fed, the great majority of suffrage workers pursued a comparatively moderate course.

The History of Woman Suffrage and The Life and Works of Susan B. Anthony are, essentially, the official records of the movement. They were intended to be exactly that and, without them and the incredible amount of information they contain, much of the history of the women’s movement would be lost. The most frequently repeated stories of the suffrage movement are largely drawn from those works and from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Memoir, Eighty Years and More.

Both works were written by the leaders of one group, the “ultras,” the radical wing of the movement led by Anthony and Stanton, and reflect their point of view. The work of the more conservative and broadly inclusive wing led by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, Mary Livermore and others is less well remembered.

Abolitionist and temperance newspapers of that period sometimes contain articles and speeches referring to or that were written by Anthony, Stanton, or Stone. One of the earliest temperance papers, The Lily, published by Amelia Bloomer in Seneca Falls, NY, was strongly influenced by Stanton, then living in Seneca Falls. Stanton essentially changed the direction of both the paper and its editor from temperance to women’s rights.

As a student at Oberlin, Lucy Stone began speaking for women’s rights during the mid-1840s and when, in 1847, she became a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Association, she spoke part of the time for women’s suffrage and part of the time for the abolition of slavery.

When Stanton and Anthony and Stone were girls, the legal situation of women, especially married women, in the United States was abysmal. Stanton contended that married women were essentially enslaved: “the condition of married women under the Common Law, was nearly as degraded as that of the slave on the Southern plantation.” [The History of Woman Suffrage] They had no legal existence apart from their husbands. Unmarried women, unless they had unusual resources, were either dependent upon family members or worked for miserably low wages. Women were not allowed in the professions and, with a few exceptions, notably the Quakers, not permitted to speak in public. They were rarely educated beyond eighth grade. They could not, of course, vote although the founding fathers had not excluded women from voting and, for a time, women in New Jersey were allowed to vote. By the time that Stanton and Anthony died, in 1902 and 1906 respectively, all of those restrictions had been removed except the prohibition against voting. Four western states did allow women to vote in federal elections during the 19th century and more were added during the early 20th century, but not until 1920 was the nineteenth amendment, franchising all adult women, ratified.

Anthony, Stanton, Lucy Stone and numerous other less well-known women worked to bring about the revolution through the last half of the 19th century. Each pointed to incidents of injustice that exemplified the need for change—Stanton was especially effective at writing the history of the suffrage movement. Her account of the background of the first women’s rights convention, the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, now memorialized by the U.S. Park Service with the Women’s Historic Park in Seneca Falls, NY, is famous.

Stanton married abolitionist Henry Stanton in 1840 (“obey” was not in the marriage ceremony) and they immediately left for London to attend The World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, an event that turned out to be, arguably, as significant for women’s suffrage as for the abolition of slavery. The American delegation to the convention included not only such stalwarts of the movement as Henry Stanton but also it was the first to include women, among them Lucretia Mott, a prominent Philadelpha Quaker. The inclusion of women had already led to a split in the American abolitionist movement with the Garrisonians favoring women as delegates and the “political abolitionists” opposing their inclusion.

British hosts, many of them clergymen, were shocked at the appearance of the women and debate over whether or not to include them occupied the first day. (Henry Stanton argued for their admission.) The Garrisonians were voted down by a “crushing majority,” according to Stanton’s biographer, Elisabeth Griffith, and the women were seated in the gallery, behind a curtain, to observe but not to participate.

Stanton and Mott became friends as a result of the anti-slavery convention—discussed the necessity for a change in women’s place in society, both legally and in the perception of women’s “proper place”—and talked about having a convention as soon as possible after their return to the United States. It was not, however, until 1848 when Mrs. Mott was visiting in the Seneca Falls area and Mrs. Stanton, now the mother of three (later seven) children, sat down with three Quaker women in Jane Hunt’s parlor in Waterloo, NY, a few miles from Seneca Falls, and planned the convention.

At the convention, which has been well documented and is usually thought of as marking the beginning of the suffrage movement, eighteen resolutions were passed. Stanton, the primary author, modeled theDeclaration of Sentiments on the Declaration of Independence, and included eighteen resolutions because there had been eighteen resolutions in the Declaration of Independence. Most controversial turned out to be the ninth resolution, resolving that women should have the franchise. Unlike the other resolutions, which passed unanimously, the ninth resolution was strongly opposed and passed by a small majority, pressed by Frederick Douglass and Stanton. As a result of the ensuing furor, especially from the press and clergy, a number of the signers of the Declaration later withdrew their signatures. One of the few favorable accounts was in Frederick Douglass’ famous North Star, the abolitionist paper he published in Rochester.

The Seneca Falls Convention was soon followed by a convention in Rochester, NY and the first national convention in Worcester, Ma. Conventions continued to be a main vehicle for organizing the suffrage movement. The History of Woman Suffrage records these conventions quite completely and original documents as well as pins, admission tickets, delegate badges, programs, etc. from them are now collectibles.

Until the Civil War, suffrage and abolitionist workers, men and women, worked together in reasonable unity for the rights of women and slaves. During the Civil War, suffrage workers partially put aside their work for women’s rights and, in 1863, Stanton, Anthony, and Stone formed the Women’s Loyal League to work for passage of the thirteenth amendment abolishing slavery.

National Woman Suffrage Association

After the war, suffrage and abolitionist supporters differed over the problem of supporting the passage of the fourteenth amendment, which extended the franchise to black men and, for the first time, specified males as voters. Stanton and Anthony, feeling betrayed by their former allies, including Douglass, formed The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). A more conservative group, The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) was led by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell and included Julia Ward Howe, Mary Livermore, and the prominent male reformers of the period. The two groups remained separate until 1890 when they merged and became the National and American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

During the period between 1867 and 1872, the leaders of NWSA were involved in events which brought the entire suffrage movement an enormous amount of unfavorable publicity and which, according to historians of the movement, set the cause back for a long time. The first was the association with George Francis Train, an open racist, who campaigned with Anthony in Kansas for the passage of a state amendment granting women’s rights and who offered to finance a suffrage newspaper. The second involved the association of Victoria Woodhull with the suffrage movement. Woodhull, who published a newspaper and was a self-nominated candidate for President of the United States, was also well known as a “free love” advocate. Third was the Beecher Tilton scandal, which also involved leaders of the suffrage movement. It was the tabloid story of its time and the popular press, especially, reveled in accusations that Beecher and Tilton’s wife were lovers. Beecher, a prominent clergyman, was President of AWSA. Theodore Tilton, who had been President of NWSA, accused Beecher of seduction and Woodhull, too, was involved. All three stories are fascinating, too complicated to summarize, but exhaustively covered by the contemporary press.Other Powers, a 1998 book by Barbara Goldsmith, covers the Woodhull and Beecher events in detail and constitutes just about the only recent “light” reading available on the suffrage movement. Goldsmith makes the case that the Beecher Tilton scandal largely explains why the suffrage movement failed to gather greater support during the last part of the century.

Both NWSA and AWSA published newspapers. NWSA’s paper, The Revolution, was underwritten for a time by Train (who also used it as a vehicle for his economic theories), and some of Stanton’s best writing appears in the early editions of The Revolution. It was the first of a number of suffrage newspapers, most of them listed in The History of Woman Suffrage, all of which are now highly collectible. Copies of The Revolution are scarce now and very collectible.

The most successful and long-lived of the suffrage papers, The Woman’s Journal, was published by the AWSA. 20th Century copies turn up most often; 19th century copies with interesting content are scarce. Newspapers published by and for workers in the suffrage movement served several purposes. They spread the news of the movement, news that was generally neglected or distorted by the popular press, and provided a sense of community to women who were often isolated. They also helped to create the new sense of self, which was so important in building the feminist movement. Two recent books on the long-neglected suffrage newspapers, one edited by Lana F. Rakow and Cheris Kramarae on The Revolution, the other, edited by Martha M. Soloman, on suffrage newspapers in general, are especially good reading on these not very well known papers.

By the beginning of the 1870’s, the suffrage movement had suffered serious set-backs: suffrage supporters were divided, The Revolution had been sold because Anthony, the publisher, was unable to get advertisers and Train, imprisoned in Ireland as a Fenian, had withdrawn his financial support. The movement was associated with scandal in the public’s mind and new approaches were clearly needed.

In the following bibliography I’ve tried to list only the most significant, recent and/or definitive works. A number of other good references, obviously, exist but many are out of print. I don’t know of a complete bibliography more recent than Albert Krichmar’s The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States 1848 – 1870, published in 1972.

Barry, Kathleen. Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist. Published in 1988, this is the most recent biography of Anthony. Earlier biographies by Alma Lutz, Kathleen Anthony, and Rheta Childe Dorr are, unfortunately, out of print. Barry’s is the most scholarly biography; Anthony’s is quite complete and very readable.

Gordon, Ann D., Editor. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Two volumes have been published: Volume I: In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840 to 1866 and Volume 2: Against an Aristocracy of Sex, 1866 – 1873. Part of a massive project from Rutgers headed by Gordon, these two volumes include letters, diary entries, speeches and articles. Wonderful notes go along with the entries.

Harper, Judith. Susan B. Anthony: A Biographical Companion. This 1998 alphabetical reference includes entries on all the people and events of the suffrage and other reform movements with which Anthony was involved and is an invaluable “quick” reference.

Griffith, Elizabeth. The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This most recent and comprehensive biography of Stanton was published in 1984.

Harper, Ida Husted. The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony. The first two volumes were written during Susan B. Anthony’s life, based on her records, and with her active assistance. They were published in 1898 and constitute her “authorized” biography. The third volume was published in 1908, two years after Anthony’s death.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. Eighty Years and More, 1815 – 1897. Stanton’s autobiography was first published in 1898. The most recent edition includes an Introduction by Ellen Carol DuBois and an Afterword by Ann D. Gordon, which add current scholarship and recent interpretation of Stanton’s work.

The Suffrage Movement

Goldsmith, Barbara. Other Powers. Thorough and entertaining coverage of the period between 1866 and 1871 when several leaders of the reform movements were involved in a series of widely publicized scandals .

Gurko, Miriam. The Ladies of Seneca Falls: The Birth of the Woman’s Rights Movement. A very readable history covering the women who led the suffrage movement and the period from 1848 through 1920. Originally published in 1974.

Kraditor, Aileen. The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890 – 1920. Classic analysis of the philosophy and tactics of the leaders of the movement.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; Anthony, Susan B.; Gage, Matilda Joslin; and Harper, Ida Husted. The History of Woman Suffrage. The six volumes were published between 1881 and 1922. The first three volumes are by Stanton, Anthony, and Gage; Volume 4 is by Anthony and Harper, and Volumes 5 and 6 are by Harper. They have been reprinted a number of times and are also available on CD-ROM.

Suffrage Newspapers

Rakow, Lana F. and Kramarae, Cheris. The Revolution in Words Righting Women 1868 – 1871. Excerpts and analysis of Stanton and Anthony’s suffrage paper.

Soloman, Martha, editor. A Voice of Their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press, 1840-1910. Various authors on the suffrage newspapers.

*Thanks to Mary Huth, Assistant Director, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Rochester, and Barbara Smith of Barbara E. Smith Books

Martha Kelly, Gutenberg Books gtbooks@frontiernet.net

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