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The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman's Rights Convention. By Judith Wellman. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. xiv, 297 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-252-02904-6. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 0-252-07173-5.)
This is an important book, in which the author assembles a comprehensive collection of well-documented information to explain why Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 was a propitious place for launching the movement for women's rights. Judith Wellman, former historian of the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls and a longtime expert on reform in upstate New York, has written the definitive work on the convention and the various factors that led to it. She argues persuasively that several issues were in play: the changing economic patterns in western New York, the particular influence of the Quaker religion and values, the political climate (which...