[In the following review, the critic offers a mostly negative assessment of History of Woman Suffrage.]

There is force in the objection which has been brought against [History of Woman Suffrage], that as woman suffrage is not achieved it has no history. But, on the other hand, it may be said that in some of the Territories women are allowed to vote at all elections, and in several States for school officers, and that the tendency is unmistakably towards the political equality of the sexes. If, therefore, a work like this could show the inception of the agitation, describe the opposition overcome, record the successive triumphs and their intervals, and leave on the reader's mind a cumulative impression of invincibility, it would need no justification, for it would undoubtedly hasten the completion of the reform. In the nature of the case, however, such a weapon can be forged only by one brain, capable of marshalling the facts in their proper sequence with telling effect. There is no evidence that any one of the three editors of the volume before us has any such capacity, and it is certain that all together they have produced one of the most disorderly and ineffective works ever dignified with the name of history. It is, in its entirety, absolutely unreadable, and the last thing to be derived from it is a feeling of the steady progress of the cause which its authors have at heart. In fact, were the reasonableness of this cause to be judged by the clearmindedness, coherency, and sense of proportion manifested in the so-called editing of this bulky retrospect, the verdict must infallibly be adverse.

Except in the resolutions and speeches of woman's-rights conventions, here given at tedious length, suffrage cuts but a small figure, and the net outcome of the agitation is exhibited in the amelioration, or more or less through abrogation, of the common-law status of married women. Had even this been systematically set forth, it would have been worth the while, for in the present chaotic state of the law no layman and few jurists can get an intelligible idea of the drift of the legislation of the past half century. It would, too, have fallen in with the otherwise bad arrangement of the chapters by States instead of chronologically. The thesis is distinctly propounded in the Introduction (p. 16):

While the laws affecting woman's civil rights have been greatly improved during the past thirty years, the political demand has made but a questionable progress, though it must be counted as the chief influence in modifying the laws.

Dates are obviously of some importance here. On p. 52 we read: "Above all other causes of the 'Woman Suffrage Movement' was the Anti-Slavery struggle in this country"; and on p. 62: "The movement for woman's suffrage, both in England and America, may be dated from this World's Anti-Slavery Convention"—in London, namely, in June, 1840. This is historic truth, and it need only be added that the first woman's-rights convention was held at Seneca Falls, N. Y., in July, 1848. Now if we turn to Dr. Henry Hitchcock's review of "Modern Legislation touching Marital Property Rights," in the Journal of Social Science for March, 1881, we shall find that "the first step towards the new legislation appears to have been taken by the State of Mississippi, by an act passed in February, 1839," more than a year before the World's Convention and nine years before the convention at Seneca Falls; that Maryland came next in 1841; that between 1844 and 1846 Maine, Michigan, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Arkansas, and the Territory of Florida joined in the movement with unequal radicalism; and that in the next four years (1846-1850) Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and California likewise "wheeled into line." From this it is evident that the dissatisfaction with the common law had manifested itself and rapidly acquired strength in fully half the States of the Union before the political doctrine of Mrs. Stanton and her colleagues could have begun to have any appreciable influence on the public mind—in many slaveholding States, too, alike abhorrent of abolitionists and of woman suffragists; and that the credit of it must be given to the tyrant man himself. We do not deny that the movement was accelerated by the general discussion of human rights which the suffrage agitation involved, as well as by the accessibility to legislative committee hearings which woman's speaking in public unquestionably secured. But this must be measured by more dispassionate and punctilious observers than the ladies whose compilation we are considering.

We shall be asked what value, if any, have these crude and ill-digested pages, and our answer must be, that of their defects and something more. There is, to begin with, no other single volume containing so much of the current reports of proceedings at the various woman's-rights meetings, or so many biographical sketches of prominent workers. The reminiscences by Mrs. F. D. Gage, Mrs. Emily Collins, Mrs. Nichols, Mrs. Stanton, and others; the tributes by the last-named to the late Mrs. Angelina Girmké Weld, Mrs. Lucretia Mott, and Mrs. Paulina Wright Davis; the account of Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose; the history of the Bloomer costume; the picture of the World's Anti-Slavery Convention, and of the World's Temperance Convention in New York—all these can be read with interest and profit. Nor can the most careless reader fail to be struck with the glimpses of the social and civil inferiority of women against which the woman's-rights movement was a protest; or to be amazed at the public opinion which regarded an assembly of women outside of a church as a fit object of mob violence. A special curiosity attaches to the valuable paper by Mr. Whitehead on female suffrage in New Jersey at the close of the last century and the beginning of the present. Finally, the arguments themselves for political equality will repay study, whatever conclusion they may lead to. Altogether, a sense of the profound change in public sentiment within a generation must arise from a perusal of this work. This may be briefly illustrated under three categories. "I remember," says Mrs. Collins (p. 88), "in my own neighborhood [in Western New York] a man who was a Methodist class-leader and exhorter, and one who was esteemed a worthy citizen, who every few weeks gave his wife a beating with a horsewhip. He said it was necessary in order to keep her in subjection, and because she scolded so much." On page 108, Prof. Timothy Walker's 'Introduction to American Law' (probably the second edition, of 1844) is cited to this effect: "In Ohio, but hardly anywhere else, is she [the wife] allowed to make a will, if haply she has anything to dispose of." Miss Anthony, at the State Teachers' Convention held at Troy in 1856, made a report as chairman of a committee on co-education. "The President, Mr. Hazeltine, of New York, congratulating Miss Anthony on her address, said: 'As much as I am compelled to admire your rhetoric and logic, the matter and manner of your address and its delivery, I would rather follow a daughter of mine to her grave than to have her deliver such an address before such an assembly" (p. 515).

Mrs. Stanton's relations with Miss Anthony, as narrated by herself, are among the amusing features of this history. In regard to so important an event as their first acquaintance, however, there is a censurable error of detail, for it is antedated by three years, if we may trust the statement that Mr. George Thompson was at Mrs. Stanton's home at the time (1851, instead of 1848), The pranks of this writer's "savages," as she calls her boys, are thought worthy of a foot-note filling half a page. But her colleague, Mrs. Gage, affords rather more entertainment in the chapter on "Preceding Causes" of the suffrage movement, among which Harriet Martineau, "Eliza Lynn, an Irish lady," and Catharine II. of Russia are enumerated in what must be called a screaming juxtaposition (p. 34). On p. 37 we are told that "in ancient Egypt the medical profession was in the hands of women, to which we may attribute that country's almost entire exemption from infantile diseases, a fact which recent discoveries fully authenticate." And a little further on there is a wonderful perversion of fact and confusion of times in a sentence which we quote literally:

Lady Montague's discovery [!] of a check to the small-pox, Madam Boivin's discovery of the hidden cause of certain hemorrhages, Madam de Coudrày's invention of the manikin, are among the notable steps which opened the way to the modern Elizabeth Blackwell, Harriot K. Hunt, Clemence S. Lozier, Ann Preston, Hannah Longshore, Marie Jackson, Laura Ross Wolcott, Marie Zakrzewska, and Mary Putnam Jacobi, who are some of the earlier [!] distinguished American examples of woman's skill in the healing art.

The second volume of this work is somewhat vaguely announced to consist of "several chapters of contemporaneous history, … contributed by friends in the Old World"; but it is reasonable to expect that the history of the suffrage agitation in this country will be carried on from the year 1861 to the present time, and that we shall at least have an exparte narrative of the serious and unhealed breach in the ranks of the woman-suffragists, with its causes and results. Meantime, we regret the taste which, under the rubric "Woman in Newspapers," permits mention, among serious and reputable journals conducted by women, of "Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, an erratic [perhaps erotic was intended] paper, advocating many new ideas."