Reviews for The American Woman's Home

The average rating for The American Woman's Home based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-09-27 00:00:00 Leonard Conway This is a compilation of key speeches spanning 1832 to 1920, the year American women FINALLY achieved suffrage. While every speech is seminal, seeing them in conversation with the long-suffering rhetorical strategizing that went on for over a century (I'm thinking back to Mary Wollstonecraft since the argument for gender equality is timeless) is enlightening. I'd never read Sojourner Truth's speeches at the 1851 Akron, OH Women's Rights Convention or her later speech as an "old" woman in 1867. I'd only heard snippets of the Grimke Sisters' moving speeches where they tie abolition to women's rights. I'd only read Ida B. Wells's "Southern Horrors" pamphlet, not the moving speech that accompanied it. Reading Elizabeth Cady Stanton's many speeches from 1848 when she was a young woman with five children underfoot through her last speech given in 1892 at age seventy-six was truly eye-opening. She is a real-life hero! Stanton's last speech was the cherry on top, the creme de la creme, the icing on the cake (I must be hungry) for me of all the included speeches--and they were each marvelous in their rhetorical prowess, historical breadth, and wit. A page turner, IMO. ;) Stanton's "The Solitude of Self" (1892) is widely considered a "rhetorical masterpiece because it explores the values underlying natural rights philosophy, because it responds creatively to the problems faced by social moments as their arguments become familiar to audiences, and because it still has the capacity to speak to contemporary audiences. It is also the most finished statement of the humanistic ideology underlying feminism" (371). Read it in this collection or scout it out online, but READ IT! I am happy to have this collection in my library. The front papers include a facsimile in Stanton's own hand from a speech she gave in 1867--priceless. The typesetting feels dated, appropriately so, as the arguments and rhetors are vintage chic. I feel annoyed their speeches weren't shared with me earlier in public school. Shame. Shame. They should be part of every student's curriculum--if it were, America would be much healthier.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-05-30 00:00:00 Deanna Kearney If you're interested in women's suffrage, this is simply a "must read." The speeches and essays in this book were clearly selected with care to form a complete picture of the history of women's suffrage in the United States, beginning long before the Seneca Falls convention. The works of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of America's truly great rhetors, are featured prominently but not without thought. One can trace the origins of the rhetoric, the splintering of the movement in the late 1800s, and then the final push for voting rights, including all the critical final efforts of Carrie Chapman Catt. Totally comprehensive with only minimal (but excellent) editorializing. Put together just perfectly.