| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists. By Jean H. Baker. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005. 277 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-8090-9528-9.)

This book is a collective biography of five famous suffrage leaders—Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Willard, and Alice Paul—written in a lively style for the general reader or the nonspecialist academic. There are more detailed memoirs and biographies available, but Jean H. Baker noted that they usually focus more on political activities than personal lives. To explain why it is important to study both, she invoked the basic feminist principle "the personal is political." This powerful concept describes the realization that personal experiences are not merely individual matters, but the result of social structures that can be challenged and changed. It has limits as an analytical tool, however, because it cannot predict who will or will not have this insight or act upon it. Among the suffragists, no single motivating factor stands out—some had supportive families, others did not; some had strong religious convictions, others did not; some were married, others single, some probably lesbian. Baker found that most commonalities relate to leadership qualities: "authoritarian and opinionated, as virtual oligarchs they created and retained authority" (p. 4). (In this context, one wonders why Carrie Catt does not have her own mini-biography.)

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