Creating the Right to Vote
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These six volumes of selected papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are the culmination of three decades of concerted research, beginning with the assembling of a 45-reel microfilm collection of all the documents by, to, or about Stanton and Anthony that Patricia Holland, Ann Gordon, and their team could find by searching more than 200 archives and almost 700 publications.1 After the completion of the microfilm collection in 1991, Ann Gordon secured further funding and assembled a talented team of editorial assistants and undergraduate students. Over the next two decades that evolving group selected, edited, and annotated almost 1,500 documents (about an eighth of the microfilm collection), which became the six volumes of the Selected Papers.
Since the Selected Papers are drawn from the microfilm edition, readers of the volumes benefit from the construction of that original collection. Holland and Gordon describe that foundational work in The Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: guide and index to the microfilm edition.2 The guide traces the provenance of Stanton and Anthony's surviving papers and the process of assembling them in the microfilm edition. Despite the length of their collaboration as leaders of the woman's rights movement and later the woman suffrage movement, Stanton and Anthony preserved very little in the way of personal or organizational papers. Stanton's place of residence moved a great deal and she cleaned out her papers regularly. Anthony saved materials more extensively, but after the completion of Ida Husted Harper's three-volume The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (1898), Harper and Anthony agreed to destroy most of the original documents that Harper had excerpted and interspersed in the narrative. Harper wrote about her biography of Anthony: "this is the only authentic biography of her that can be written, as the letters and documents will not be accessible to other historians" (Guide, p. 4).
Thus, the microfilm edition was largely constructed from the dispersed archival collections of their correspondents and contemporary published pamphlets, proceedings, and newspaper accounts. Because so much of Stanton and Anthony's incoming correspondence was destroyed, recovered outgoing [End Page 78] correspondence in the collection exceeds incoming by a ratio of 3:1 (Guide, p. 4). And the composition of documents in the microfilm edition is reflected in the documents published in the Selected Papers.
Yet, even with these constraints of the surviving documentary record, these volumes are a monumental achievement. They dramatically extend access to Stanton and Anthony's letters and writings. And they deepen our understanding of the complex social movement that Stanton and Anthony led. Certainly the volumes deserve to be more widely known and appreciated. As I began work on this review, I was surprised by how few reviews of the individual volumes appeared in scholarly journals, despite the obvious significance of Stanton and Anthony and the scholarly excellence of the editorial work. I found only eight reviews in eight journals: four reviewed volume 1 alone; one treated volumes 1 and 2; two focused on volume 2; and a final review noted volume 3. There are no reviews of volumes 4, 5, or 6. Although the project published six volumes that appeared over sixteen years, no journal published more than one review. This neglect reflects the prejudices of historians against documentary editions in general, as well as the segregation of women's history in a venue apart from "mainstream" American history. No review of any volume appeared in Signs or the Journal of Women's History or the American Historical Review. In contrast, the comparable, multi-volume Samuel Gompers Papers were reviewed fifteen times in journals listed in JSTOR with four reviews in the Journal of Economic History, and two reviews each in the Journal of American History and Labour/Le Travail.
The Selected Papers are, of course, a reference resource, and readers will dip into them to answer very specific research questions. Yet they are more than reference tools and collections...
