Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony

June 10, 2019 Posted by: Tom Dewey, Librarian

Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, by Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were two heroic women who vastly bettered the lives of a majority of American citizens. The book, Not for Ourselves Alone, describes how the two women worked for more than fifty years as they led a public battle to secure many basic civil rights for women. Their work helped establish a movement that would revolutionize American society.

Authors Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns describe Stanton and Anthony as close friends, partners, and allies. Their backgrounds suggest that they would seem like an unlikely pair.  Stanton was born into the prominent Livingston family in New York and grew up wealthy, educated and sociable. She later married and had a large family of her own.  Anthony, a devout Quaker, worked most of her adult life to support herself and remained single. She devoted herself to progressive causes like temperance and abolition. The authors state that the two were nearly opposites in their personalities, yet complemented each other’s strengths perfectly. Stanton was a gifted writer and radical thinker, but pinned down by her family responsibilities. Anthony was a tireless and single-minded tactician and was eager for action. As Stanton put it, “I forged the thunderbolts, she fired them.”

The relationship between these two extraordinary women and its effect on the development of the suffrage movement are richly depicted by authors Ward and Burns and in the essays by Ellen Dubois, Ann Gordon and Martha Saxton. We also see Stanton and Anthony’s interactions with major figures of the time, from Frederick Douglass and John Brown to Lucretia Mott and Victoria Woodhull.

The book is enhanced by a wonderful array of black-and-white and color illustrations. Not for Ourselves Alone is a vivid and inspiring portrait of two of the most fascinating and important characters in American history.