| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman's Rights in Antebellum New York. By Lori D. Ginzberg. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xiv, 222 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2947-1. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5608-8.)

Lori D. Ginzberg's inventive and well-written microhistory, Untidy Origins, has as one of its intentions to rewrite the chronology of woman suffrage advocacy in the United States. Six "ordinary" women from rural Jefferson County in northern New York petitioned the state legislature in 1846, two years before the historic Seneca Falls Convention, requesting a return to "true democratic principles" and the extension "to women [of] equal, and civil and political rights with men" (p. 203). Ginzberg seeks less to find out why these women took the pioneering action that they did—as she demonstrates, the fullness of their motivations is beyond the capacity of the available evidence to illuminate—than to restore the larger intellectual, social, legal, and political context in which equal political rights for women became thinkable in this decade and in this place. She roundly and repeatedly rejects the notion that women's political equality was an idea too advanced for popular comprehension and advocacy, contending instead that proponents of this and other political innovations, championed earlier by working-class, secular radicals, fought back against consistent assaults from insurgent, evangelical Protestantism.

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