Suffrage, by Ellen Carol Dubois

In the present climate of re-examining the appropriateness of certain types of monumental public art, one of the things that's said -- by way of arguing that those certain types of monumental art should remain -- is that the men in question "should be judged by the standards of their time," or some such variant of the sentiment that people in the past didn't have available to them the same ethical or moral norms that we have today, and thus can hardly be blamed for thinking, speaking, or acting outside of them.

We could let this slide by if -- let's say in the context of the mid-19th century -- we were talking about such scientific concepts as germ theory: there was no scientific knowledge available to contradict the firmly-held belief among Civil War battlefield surgeons that boils populating the site of a wound were filled with "noble pus" and therefore to be encouraged.

This is most emphatically not the case when it comes to human relations, particularly in the Christian West in any of the Anni Domini following 33 (or, ok, I'll give you up to 333). Either there is no man, woman, slave, Jew, or Greek, or there is. It seems to me that a lot of American history is spent saying that, regardless of how Jesus may have thought, we think differently -- or at least we act as if we think differently, with our absurd, Escherian upstairs/downstairs distribution of who is qualified to rule. Worse (for Americans) we can't even act as if we understand the sense of our own founding revelation (the Declaration of Independence) which essentially repeats the belief in universal human equality even if it puts it on a more agnostic plane better suited to the one that will finally reach germ theory.

The problem, then, is not lack of availability. It is, rather, that Thomas Jefferson cannot actually take a piss without lifting the lid, even though he knows it's the right thing to do. Thomas Jefferson cannot do as Thomas Jefferson reasons. And this is the case even when there are people hollering that, in fact, up can be up!

In fact, of course, the problem is much worse, since so many people of influence and power don't even rise to the level of hypocrisy. They use might to defy right and manufacture patriotic bunting, theological apologesis, and pseudo-science to disguise demonic actions that some explainers fob off as "the law of the jungle," but which would horrify a baboon.

All this is by way of saying that Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote by Ellen Carol Dubois should be on every American's bookstand in this month of the centennial of the 19th amendment. It is thrilling to read, particularly if, like me, you come into it with only the sketchiest knowledge of the history of the subject. Of particular interest to me were the ways in which the movement for woman suffrage interacted with the movement for Black (male) suffrage: the early unity between the two fractured and spun out into separate orbits as if by some peculiar physical law of American politics. Oh, and racism.

The overall impression, however, is that the women who dedicated their lives to this cause themselves caused the USA to bring itself into at least 51% better focus than it had been before. Moreover, they were forthright from the very outset in such a way that no one can say there was no sentiment available for changing the way things were.

This book's appendix includes the text of the movement's founding document, the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments written by a group of women including Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and promulgated to the world after a 2-day meeting in Seneca Falls, NY. Says author Dubois, "News of a public protest meeting in favor of women's economic, civil, educational, and political rights went viral throughout New York state and into Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Cady Stanton and her sister organizers knew that what they were doing was unprecedented, but they did not anticipate the mean-spirited, demeaning ridicule that came down on them, drawing on every possible negative stereotype of manly women and effeminate men. The women were called 'Amazons,' their dignified proceedings 'A Petticoat Revolution.'"

But the genius of the Declaration of Sentiments is that its style, organization, and even verbiage all derive from the Declaration of Independence. It both stakes out the high ground and takes it. The old standard thus becomes the new standard, easily available to everyone who subscribed to the old one.

From there -- in a dramatic story well told by this book -- followed a cloud of dedicated witnesses to see its suffrage aspect, at least, to fruition some 72 years later. For such Amazons we should be ever grateful, especially given that so many American males still cannot be brought to lift the damn lid before they piss, not to mention wear a mask for the safety of others.