Movie Review

Before Ken Burns and Paul Barnes decided to make their film Not for Ourselves Alone, as they confessed in a promotional advertisement, they had never heard of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Forgotten crusader? Or perhaps overexposed heroine is better. The filmmakers' statement reveals how public history (written for a mass audience, usually a college-educated market) has become isolated from the thriving field of women's and gender history. No Ph.D. in American history would so shamelessly report never having heard of Stanton, nor would she or he have failed to mention women's rights, woman suffrage, or Seneca Falls in an introductory survey class.	1
Indeed, Stanton is nothing less than a heroine, generally praised by academics as the foremost intellectual of the early women's movement, credited with having ignited nineteenth-century feminism, and anointed as the founding "mother" of woman suffrage. Those glowing tributes to Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are repeated countless times in the hyperbolic sound bites of the experts interviewed for the film: "They are women's history of the nineteenth-century"; "lightning bolts began to come out of the sky . . . they were the force of the women's movement"; "There would not have been a women's rights movement without Susan B. Anthony."	2
Unfortunately, public historians remain hampered by the desire to elevate "great women" into the pantheon of major historical figures. Amid the millennial celebration, Arts & Entertainment announced the hundred most important people of the last thousand years: Stanton made the list, but not Anthony. This quest for the holy grail of historical greatness comes at the cost of scholarly integrity. The interpretative act of making Stanton and Anthony the sole originators of the women's movement erases from history other, equally significant activists. More troubling, Not for Ourselves Alone reduces a complex movement that lasted seventy-two years to the insular story of two women whose personal relationship substitutes for historical analysis.	3
Despite its title, Not for Ourselves Alone removes Stanton and Anthony from their world, from the wide range of political issues they faced and the large circle of reformers with whom they interacted. Contrary to experts' statements, there would have been a vibrant women's movement without them. Not a single mention is made of the organizers of all the other conventions held in the antebellum period; the most glaring (yet typical) omission is Paulina Wright Davis, organizer of the national women's rights conventions between 1850 and 1860, who considered holding a convention a year before the one at Seneca Falls. Inaccurately, the film makes sure that Stanton and Anthony are credited with every important accomplishment from 1848 until their deaths. Burns and Barnes feint toward acknowledging Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Frances Harper, and Sojourner Truth, though their contributions are never really explained. But even eight people do not constitute a movement. In part 2 of the film, Anna Howard Shaw, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Alice Paul are alluded to briefly, but their position relative to the two heroines is diminished because Shaw and Catt are identified as the conservative heirs of the suffrage movement. Invariably, Stanton and Anthony stand alone (and politically apart) from their less gifted, if not nameless, coadjutors.	. . .