Faye E. Dudden - Fighting Chance. The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America [2011][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: July 13, 2011
The advocates of woman suffrage and black suffrage came to a bitter falling-out in the midst of Reconstruction, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the 15th Amendment because it granted the vote to black men but not to women. How did these two causes, so long allied, come to this?
Based on extensive research, Fighting Chance is a major contribution to women's history and to 19th-century political history--a story of how idealists descended to racist betrayal and desperate failure.

Reviews
"A nuanced analysis...Dudden's reexamination of this crucial moment in American politics is a welcome addition to the historiography of the woman suffrage movement and a significant contribution to the history of movement in politics." --Kansas History

"The strength of [Dudden's] book lies in the depth of her analysis. Historians usually skip over these years, depicting events in a well-rehearsed and too-often schematic way. Few have taken the time to plumb the sources as thoroughly as Dudden does, or to situate Stanton and Anthony as effectively in the political moment of which they were a part." --Women's Review of Books

"An important and riveting history of the struggle for women's rights in the Civil War era, which illuminates the tumultuous political context for the split between suffragists and abolitionists. Essential reading for anyone interested in women, race, and American politics in the nineteenth century." --Carol Faulkner, author of Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

"Tackling one of the most difficult and debated stories in American history, Faye Dudden succeeds in clearing the deck and starting afresh. From a vast array of sources and with remarkable courage, she crafts something wholly new. None of us at work in this field comes through her hands unscathed, but more important, Fighting Chance will influence the history of Reconstruction for years to come." --Ann D. Gordon, Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Rutgers University

"A closer examination and a more nuanced interpretation of these shifting alliances, the economic disabilities of female reformers, and the political maneuvering than other studies have given us, this book explains, though does not apologize for, the positions of these otherwise well-regarded feminists. Likely to be a classic study, it is recommended for all readers in American studies and Reconstruction history." --Library Journal

"Historian Dudden's meticulous scholarship details events that led women, in what she calls a 'massive' moral failure, to oppose a Fifteenth Amendment that did not enfranchise women along with black men... Using newly available correspondence, newspapers, and details of little-studied resources earmarked for women's rights activism, Dudden challenges readers to take a clear-eyed view of the 'founding mothers of suffrage feminism.'" --CHOICE

About the Author
Faye E. Dudden is Professor of History at Colgate University. Her previous books include Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America and Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790-1870, which won the George Freedley Memorial Prize.