| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Sharon Hartman Strom. Political Woman: Florence Luscomb and the Legacy of Radical Reform. (Critical Perspectives on the Past.) Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 340. Cloth $79.50, paper $24.95.

Alhough Sharon Hartman Strom's exciting new biography of the Boston-based activist Florence Hope Luscomb was almost thirty years in the making, it arguably offers the reader a richer perspective on its subject's life than if it had been published earlier, perhaps before Luscomb's death at ninety-eight in 1985. A scholar of women's labor and women in social reform, Strom deepens her presentation by recounting her personal relationship to this project. She met Luscomb in 1971 through her friend Steven Halpern, Luscomb's Cambridge housemate. As they got to know this warm, articulate, and independent woman, Strom and Halpern envisioned writing some kind of biography. Eventually the project became Strom's alone, and although she continued to gather notes and sustain her acquaintance with Luscomb, the biography languished, victim of other projects and of life itself. 1

Strom's account of the project's history, woven into the beginning and end of the book, offers a nuanced and appropriate context for understanding Luscomb's place in the history of women and American reform movements. Initially distanced from Luscomb by seemingly contrasting ideas of feminism and different experiences of family, Strom was also attracted to Luscomb's lifelong devotion to progressive causes, philosophical humanism, and gritty persistence. Having written about half the biography, Strom put the manuscript aside in the mid-1970s, only to return to it ten years later—at precisely the moment, unbeknownst to her, that Luscomb was dying. Although "not a believer in mystical experiences" (p. 8), Strom found threads of her own life—issues of middle age, motherhood, and grieving for old losses—that led her back to what she could now see as lacunae in her younger interpretation of Luscomb. . . .

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