Arguments For And Against Hydroelectric Power Environmental Sciences Essay

Arguments For And Against Hydroelectric Power Environmental Sciences Essay The dams that are built are holding back a higher level of water in an area called the reservoir. From here the water is let through the plant intake and into the penstock which brings it down to a turbine water wheel at the lower water level. The water pressure increases at it flows down the penstock and it is this pressure as well as flow that drive the turbine that is connected to the generator. Inside the generator there is a turbine,. Here large electro magnets are attached to the router and located within coils within copper wires in the Stator. As the generator router spins a flow of electrons are released within the coils of the stator. This produces electricity that can be stepped up in voltage through the station transforms and sent through transition lines.  [2]  The amount of electricity generated here is depending on the volume of water flow and amount of hydraulic head  [3]  (The vertical distance between the surface of the reservoir and the surface of the river immediately downstream from the dam  [4]  ) Hydroelectric power is responsible for approximately fifteen percent of the world electricity and is therefore the largest renewable source of energy in the world.  [5]  It has through its green image been worshiped for being eco-friendly and is reliable in terms of consistency and shut down time if so wishes. The design is also reliable and any futures damages will not be that expensive to repair as well as only a few breakdowns have occurred throughout the years. Also that hydro power is independent from fossil fuels and the operation costs are very low compared to several other energy sources. So what is the reason to why activists and scientist has reacted so strong upon this renewable energy source? A source like this that is 90 percent efficient when its converted from water pressure to kinetic energy and the groundwater is increased by reserving water in the reservoir  [6]  , shouldnt this be good? The fact that hydroelectric power controls flooding and provide flood protection in downstream areas  [7]  does not necessary have to be good. The water that is trapped within the reservoir is damaging to the quality since it will lower the dissolvent of oxygen as well as reduce the nutrition and sediments due to lack of the water flow  [8]  . Furthermore will the lack of water flow create particles and unwanted vermin into the hydrogen cycle. When the water is leaving the dams the risk for erosion is high because of the lack of the original currency from the water as well as increasing the risk for the flood to clog  [9]  . The hydropower station s is interrupting the ecosystem and the habitants of the river. Therefore have the government and different regulation such as EU constructed regulations that the plant must fulfill. The problem with this is that the regulations are set to low and that private investors can sneak their way by this. Low Impact Hydrogen Institute have created a voluntary certificate for plants to demonstrate their facilities, this would benefit the plant as well since it would drag consumers to invest in such a hydro plant  [10]  . Though few actually goes through with this certificate. Furthermore, when building such massive stations it takes time, space and money. Scientists are arguing that when the actual construction of the power station is finished it does not take much construction work or entertainment, though they do not mention the side effects for animals and humans in a local, regional and global area. 2000, The Three Gorges Dam Project, over one million people were forced to move from their homes due to the construction of a hydroelectrically power station in China. It had a huge social effect for the people having to leave their homes where immemorial traditions and believes were held, for an unknown resort were their roots never had visited.  [11]  Large areas will have to evacuate and the local will suffer from this. Also biological effects will occur since the construction will interfere with the agriculture. Hydropower stations are well known for the massive percentage of the fishes that gets killed when passing through the station. The turbines have to become more developed to increase the mortality rate of the fishes in the water. Furthermore it can also become hard for some animals to complete their life cycle as the flooding is being controlled; sometimes it is almost impossible for them  [12]  . Adaption takes time and the time given is not enough for extensive b iological changes. A hydropower station will have effects upon self-managed eco systems, the breeding of animals lives and algaes as well as disrupt natural seasonal change, the question is; is it worth it? In Nelson, B.C., Canada, about two hundred people protested against the growing number of hydroelectric power stations.  [13]  In Canada the hydro plants is responsible for the extensive amount of sixty percent of the countrys total energy output. Also the province of Quebec is responsible for the worlds largest production of hydro electrical power  [14]  . We are concerned about our ecosystem. We are concerned about the wildness of that creek, said Yeow, a member of the Slocan River Stream keepers  [15]  . The project planner for this particular hydroelectric power station told the media and the protesters that the river-project is going to be a part of B.C ´s energy future since the demand for energy is far too extensive to consider another energy source. Also that hydropower stations is one of the cleanest ways of providing an area with energy. Is this true? The Scientist, 24 February 2005 by Duncan Graham-Rowe, published an article supporting the fact that hydroelectric power stations does not deserve to be associated with a green image or environmental friendly. These dams should be an example of a renewable energy source that do not need fossil fuels or emit any greenhouse gases. A new researches show though that hydro power stations regularly produces a significant amount of carbon dioxide and methane. The green image of hydro power as a benign alternative to fossil fuels is false, says Eric Duchemin, a consultant for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Everyone thinks hydro is very clean, but this is not the case, he says.  [16]   The reason to these emissions is the carbon that is tied up in plants and the trees gets stored in the reservoir when it is flooded and the plants rot. As it begins to decay the plants on the reservoirs bottom decomposes without oxygen which creates dissolved methane. This gets released into the atmosphere and cause drastic effects. Methane has a twenty-one times stronger effect on global warming than carbon dioxide has  [17]  . The reason why this has not been more spread is because the emission varies from plant to plant; sometimes it is environmental friendly, sometimes it is contributing more to the greenhouse effect than the burning of fossil fuels does. Though if the bad side effects will continue to occur more frequently it will bring consequences for mankind. Hydroelectric power is a renewable source of energy and therefore it will not run out but the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will increase and the long term effects will be drastic. It might be good for the indiv idual businesses when having a stable source to rely on but without our planet intact, it will not matter. Before building a plant the construction leaders will have to look at the development of the plant. How much will have to be put into the area? How developed is it? If no development at all exists than the operation will have to go even further; infrastructure, transportation, waterways, and bridges. Also maintaining water quality, archeological areas and artifacts will cost money  [18]  . It all will cost and the local area will suffer if the economical aspect is not taken care of. An example of this is the hydro power station Akocak HHP, Trabzon, Turkey, that cost approximately $124 million to construct  [19]  . This had drastic effects upon the local area but regional it contributed to Turkeys welfare. Since a hydropower station can have an effect upon the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) it is most likely this were the case of Turkey. To analyze other regions or countries cost of data and input can help the country grow and make the decision if power plant would contribute to the countries well-fare. Obviously though with environmental and local side effects. Globally the trends of energy sources follow the same pattern: when oil prices goes up, the search for other alternative energy sources become attractive. The government sees the hydropower as an efficient energy source and even though the construction of it will be expensive it will pay off in the long run when looking at it from an economical aspect. This whole cycle is important considering globalization, trade and relations to other countries.  [20]   21 The consequences for having hydroelectric power plants have been supported and opposed because of many reasons, among several have been mentioned in the text. It is not just to build a dam but to look at the surrounding as well, because it will have environmental, economic, political and social effects. The agriculture will suffer even though mankind tries to prevent this through technology. Because nature has a power that is greater than humanity and this do the opposing environmentalists and social scientists agree with. But shouldnt we look through the population and business aspect? Population can always be moved and greenhouse gases are not always the case. Infrastructure can be build and trade can be in favor and technology can prevent nature from taking its path. Everything is relative and different depending on which pair of glasses you chose to look through.

Patient`s Laws Essay

Patients should feel at ease when giving personal information to their physician or nurse (Burkle & Cascino, 2011). Patients may resist offering pertinent information if they feel their confidence may be betrayed. Confidentiality can only be broken when it involves a gunshot wound, injuries resulting from child abuse or an infectious disease, which would put the community at risk. Such is the case presented in Nathanson’s article titled: â€Å"Betraying trust or providing good care? When is it okay to break confidentiality?† (2000). The article addresses an ethical dilemma presented in an episode of NBC’s ER. Nurse Carol Hathaway promises two reluctant teenage patients who are seeking care, that anything they tell her will remain confidential, even from their parents and anyone else. Agreeable to this, the girls divulge they have been sexually active with multiple partners and suspect they have been exposed to a sexually transmitted disease (STD). Tests were perf ormed on the teenager for STD’s and receive Pap tests to detect any cervical abnormalities. The test results confirm, Andrea, is positive for the human papillomavirus (HPV) and cervical cancer. Promising Andrea confidentiality, Nurse Hathaway knows she must break the promise or potentially endanger herself and the community. Nurse Hathaway is faced with ethical consequences if she breaks confidentiality with her patient. Of these consequences are reluctance to disclose pertinent information, feelings of betrayal, enraged parents, disrespect of staff members, job termination, demeaned hospital reputation, poor school reputation, and a non supportive bureaucratic and legal system (Burkhardt & Nathaniel, 2008). Nurses are fearful of these ethical implications, which keep them from disclosing important information, which can have disastrous results (Griffith, 2008). Deontology best describes Nurse Hathaway’s ethical framework when she finds it necessary to break Andrea’s confidentiality. The deontology theory is based on the concept that a person adheres to what is right and wrong in their actions and thoughts rather than the consequences (Purtilo & Doherty, 2011) . Since this has become a public issue she is compelled to fulfill her duty by courageously choosing to bring the situation out in the open. Her reasoning for informing Andrea’s parents and school would ensure the appropriate course of treatment and avoiding further injury for the teen and society. Even though Nathanson says  there is no advantage in notifying the school of Andrea’s sexual involvement with multiple partners, Nurse Hathaway chose to do so. By doing this, Andrea attempts to take her life when she finds out the school is aware of her situation. There are several ethical decision-making models to choose from but the best would be Uustal’s model to handle this particular situation. Uustal proposes a nine-step method to direct one toward making an ethical decision. This model follows the nursing process and also includes and explanation of values when using and ethical decision-making model. Step 1) those implicated in the dilemma are the teenage girls, their parents, the students at the school and Nurse Hathaway. Whether or not to inform the school of the sexual behavior of the girls and of Andrea’s diagnosis is the ethical dilemma at hand. Step 2) without giving specific information about the girls, the school needs to be aware of the student’s sexual conduct with multiple partners. Step 3) the spread of HPV and the concern for the protection of the community from STD’s related to promiscuous sex are the issues related to the situation. A resolution to the dilemma would to inform the school of the concern for the sexual behavior of the students. Step 5) with good intentions, Nurse Hathaway notifies the school of the girl’s activities but should not kept their identities anonymous and only discussed her concern for the students in general about their participation in multiple sex partners. Step 5) implementing education in the school regarding the risks, treatments and prevention of STD’s would follow. Step 6) the main priority should have been informing the school of the promiscuity among the students rather than of the two teens in question and Andrea’s new found diagnosis. Step 7) Nurse Hathaway should have only discussed her concern for sex with multiple partners between the students. Step 8 and 9) if Nurse Hathaway had followed th is model, education could have occurred, the school would have been protected and Andrea’s privacy would have been respected. This particular model allows for the analysis of various options to sensitive, ethical dilemmas. An ethics committee consists of of representatives from different fields in and outside of health care as well as professionals, lawyer, clergyman, etc., from the community. With different perspectives, experiences, and educational backgrounds the committee can have a well-rounded discussion and provide suggestions proposed to advocate for the rights of patients and foster mutual decision  making in the event of an ethical dilemma. When conflicting moral claims are presented, the ethics committee can suggest an unbiased approach to solving the ethical dilemma (Burkhardt & Nathaniel, 2008). Consulting with an ethics committee would have been in Nurse Hathaway’s best interest before deciding to break confidentiality. Had she not divulged pertinent information about Andrea to her school, Andrea most likely would not have attempted suicide. In conclusion, as nurses we are confronted with ethical dilemmas pertaining to upholding confidentiality in our day-to-day practice. Ethical decisions should not be taken lightly and treated exclusively with sensitivity for our patients and the public. Making the wrong decision could cost us the trust we build with out patients and community and our job. Burkhardt, M. A., & Nathaniel, A. K. (2008). Ethics & issues in contemporary nursing (3rd ed.). Clifton Park, NY: Delmar Cengage Learning. Burkle, C. M., & Cascino, G. D. (2011, December). Medicine and the media: Balancing the public’s right to know with the privacy of the patient. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 86(12), 1192-1196. Ethical decision-making lecture [Module 3 lecture]. Retrieved from Grand Canyon University: http://my.gcu.edu. Griffith, R. (2008). Patient confidentiality: rights and duties of nurse prescribers. Nurse Prescribing, 6(2), 116-120. Purtilo, R. B., & Doherty, R. B. (2011). Ethical dimensions in the health professions (5th ed.). St. Louis, MO: Elsevier.

Designing a Reward System Essay

A good manager or superior will implement a reward system. Employee reward systems are used to assist and help motivate the employees, with the goal not to just meet expectations, but to surpass them performing at their best capabilities. The reward system that goes into place should include all benefits monetary and non-monetary that proves to be worth something valuable to the employee. Implementing a reward system for a human service organization will make sure that basic needs are met, benefits are equally distributed, competitive benefits are offered, and employees are treated as individuals. I will include intrinsic and extrinsic rewards in my system. When you have a suitable reward system in place it will ensure that an organizations investment in its employees is managed effectively. Organizations that do not match or are not as productive as their competitors will have problems attracting and keeping the most valuable workers. I will do everything I can within my organization to keep my employees happy to uphold a respectable working environment to reach our goals. Obviously, taking care of our clients by providing them the greatest possible service is our number one goal. Acknowledgment and gratitude are very important constituents of a successful reward system. Reward systems have a significant result on the quality of life of the employees working within the organization. Recognition means to identify and show appreciation for someone’s detailed accomplishment. Having gratitude and displaying appreciation to an employee for their work goes a long way when concerning the performance of an employee. Several employees need to know that they are appreciated and their hard work will not go ignored. I believe several employees would work even harder for their employer if they know that their hard work will be appreciated, and they get rewarded for it. The procedures of determining what aspects of the work should be monitored and rewarded are monitoring, planning, developing, rewarding, and rating. To have an operative organization, the essential work should be planned out in advance. Setting goals and expectations to meet the organization’s goals, is a part of the planning technique. I will include the employees in the planning process so they can comprehend what will to be expected from them within the organization. I will screen projects and assignments so I will recognize what areas will require improvement. I will give regular feedback on the employees’ progress as well as their performance. I have confidence that by providing feedback will assist employees in predetermined standards while directing them away from problematic standards. Observing and staying on top of employees’ performance will help keep unacceptable performance limited. I will increase employees’ skills within the organization by providing them with workshops and seminars to enhance their knowledge. I will ensure basic needs are met by determining the cost of living for my employees. I will make sure that the salary my employees make can meet these basic needs, such as food, shelter, and clothes. Having job security is also a need; the employee should feel a sense of security within the workplace, knowing that their presence is a vital asset to the organization. Competitive benefits will be offered such as vacation packages, bonuses, sick leave, holiday pay, insurance packages, and even retirement. Having these benefits will push the employees to work at their fullest potential, and work even harder to show their manager or superior that they are a valuable asset to the organization, and that they have the capability to advance. The nine factors would should implement are respect for me as a person, large amount of freedom on the job, being told by the boss when I do a good job, opportunity for self-development and improvement, opportunity to do interesting work, feeling my job is important, chance for promotion, good pay, and chance to turn out quality work. All the factors mentioned are necessary to be implemented into the reward system. In order to get respect you must give it, as a manager if you give respect to your employees it will make them give it in return making them see how valuable they are, and making them work even harder. Having a large amount of freedom will ensure the employee opportunity for self-development and improvement. Pay attention and listen to the ideas of the employees, and this is because they are those that usually work the closet with the client one on one. When the boss expresses that an employee is doing a good job, it will boost the employee to be more confident and allow them to excel in their position, this will also happen when good pay is involved. In order to accomplish good pay, raises should be considered during certain times of the year based on the employee’s performance, and a review should be in place as well. It is important to give employees the chance to produce quality work. Give the employee a chance instead of setting them up for disappointment. It would not be such a good idea to elect a mission for an employee that you know would be beyond possible for them to complete successfully. This could make the employee feel inadequate. Contemplate advancements; everyone should have a chance to prove their capabilities allowing them to move up the ladder at some point. The bottom line is that implemented these factors into the reward system it will enhance your employees to work harder and maintain a happy, healthy working environment. Ultimately, designing a reward system will give everyone in the organization benefits. The manager and superior will be happy and less stressed. The employees will be happy and grateful that they have incentives, benefit packages, and manager who value them as an employee. In the end, the clients who are the most important in the human service organization will also be content knowing that their case worker is dedicated to their job. After all that is why we have this career in the first place.

Music Of Mozart Effect On Children - 1266 Words

The â€Å"Mozart effect† is a statement based on research studies claiming that listening to the music of Mozart may produce an increase in your IQ and performance in certain types of mental tasks. This effect was applied not just to adults, but later also to unborn and postpartum babies up to 60 days old. The â€Å"Mozart effect† stemmed from research carried out in 1993 by researchers Frances H. Rauscher, Gordon L. Shaw and Katherine N. Ky at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at UC Irvine, California. Other research studies have found no statistics to support the â€Å"Mozart effect†. These studies gained media attention which resulted in the phrase â€Å"Mozart effect†. Numerous studies have been carried out since the initial 1993†¦show more content†¦Gordon L. Shaw a physicist and Katherine N. Ky (the ‘Rauscher 1993’ study) all researchers at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at UC Irvine, California. They conducted a study where a group of 36 adult college students were exposed to Mozart’s Sonata in D Major for Two Pianos (K448), followed by a relaxation tape or silence – the â€Å"three conditions†. Each exposure lasted for 10 minute intervals followed by three sets of IQ spatial reasoning tests using the Stanford-Binet intelligence scale which is a standardized test to measure intelligence. All of the students were given the same test designed to measure spatial IQ, which involved them mentally unfolding a piece of paper that has been folded multiple times and cut. The goal was to select the correct unfolded paper from five examples. The results of the experiment showed those students who listened to the Mozart Sonata scored significantly higher than the students who listened to the relaxation tape or sat in silence. The average score for those students who listened to Mozart was an 8-9 point increase in IQ. This increase however was only temporary lasting for no longer than 10-15 minutes. The researcher’s findings were published in the October 14, 1993 edition of the international journal ‘Nature’, which publishes new and innovative research in diverse scientific categories. The article garnered a lot of media and public attention and speculation which resulted in

The Importance Of Human Suffering - 1493 Words

Dorian Williams ENG 221 (001) Dr. Halpern The Importance of Human Suffering Over the course of this semester we have read several books and plays that have in one way or another tie into the overall theme of human suffering. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Prometheus Bound, Women of Troy, etc.†¦.all contain elements of intense suffering, despair, and struggle, which made each of them particularly hard for me to not only read, but digest. The Book of Job in fact, was at first the single most depressing piece of literature I’ve read so far in my academic career, simply because it seemed to be page upon page of suffering without any hope of relief. As I look back and reflect, I find myself asking why the concept of human suffering is so important, especially when regarding literature (because obviously we wouldn’t learn about it if it wasn’t), and why authors and playwrights throughout history have chosen to build their work around it. After further thought, I believe that in a unique way human suffering in literature is vital because it inspires hope, restores faith, reveals truths, and aids us in our daily wrestle with personal struggle. Whether or not we like it or care to admit it, two things remain true when talking about human suffering. First off, suffering exists, plain and simple. Many people try to absurdly pretend that it doesn’t, and that they’ll never experience struggle or pain because it only exists for those who allow themselves to believe it does.Show MoreRelatedAnimal Rights And Utilitarianism1063 Words   |  5 Pagesguidelines for having interests concern sentience; the ability to experience suffering. Comparing to the ideas of Mill, both are utilitarians and have a similar ideology around interests and moral consideration around the treatment of animals. Singer’s position on not eating meat is based on the utilitarian principle that ethical actions are the ones that create the most pleasure. 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Essay about CFS 388 Midterm Review - 2851 Words

Chapter 1 Cross Cultural Comparisons: people have different sexual attitudes and behaviors positions missionary- woman lying on her back with the man on top normal is defined by the community in which we live americans are known as ethnocentric- our own cultures behavior and customs as correct or as the way things should be if we traveled to another country we would be seen as â€Å"strange† USA people think negative about armpits but Abkhazian men are aroused by seeing a woman’s armpits navel is arousing in Samoa and a knee is erotic in New Guinea and Celebes Islands USA men are aroused by breasts, Polynesian men are fascinated with the size, shape, and consistency of women’s genitals body weight is an important determinant†¦show more content†¦dia in EUROPE show more nudity than in the united states Chapter 2 Clitoris- a small, elongated erectile structure in women that develops from the same embryonic tissue as the penis Cowper’s Gland- two pea-shaped structures located beneath the prostate gland in men that secrete a few drops of an alkaline fluid prior to orgasm Hymen- the thin membrane that partially covers the vaginal opening in many sexually inexperienced women G Spot- a small, sensitive area on the front wall of the vagina found in about 10% of women Penis- the male organ for sexual intercourse and the passageway for sperm and urine Scrotum- the pouch beneath the penis that contains testicles Vuvla- external female genitalia, including the mons veneris, labia majora, labia minora, clitoris, vaginal opening, urethral opening All men over the age of 50 should have an annual examination to check for cancer of the PROSTATE GLAND In women, the two outer elongated folds of the skin that extend from the mons to the perineum are called LABIA MAJORA?The innermost layer of the uterus, which is sloughed off and discharged from the woman?s body during menstruation is called ENDOMETRIUM In men, an erection results from the spongy tissues of the penis becoming engorged with BLOOD?When a man becomes sexually aroused a few drops of a clear fluid produced by the COWPERS GLANDS may appear at the tip of the penis Breast size in women is determined by the AMOUNT OF FATTY TISSUE The best time

Seneca Falls Essay Example For Students

Seneca Falls Essay One hundred and fifty years ago this summer, in the little country town of SENECA FALLS in upstate New York, several dozen excited women and a few interested men held the first meeting in the world devoted solely to womens rights. It was 1848, the springtime of the peoples in Europe; and, although these Americans were far removed from the emancipatory proclamations in Europe, they caught the fever and produced one of their own, the Declaration of Sentiments: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal. Compared to the apocalypticism of The Communist Manifesto, another product of that year, the SENECA FALLS Declaration seems modest, a relic of right-thinking republicanism rather than a portent of wrenching revolutionary transformation. Yet its effects were destined to be no less profound, and far more benign. The gathering in 1848 emerged from a long, fitfully articulated history of womens grievances, though the participants were not aware of it. The interruption of historical memory and, in its absence, the strains of improvising a politics of grievance on the spot, have always characterized this tradition. The written record of female protest extends back to the late middle ages, to the French woman of letters Christine de Pizan and her Book of the City of Ladies. It was in the late eighteenth century, however, that the language of the rights of man gained momentum around the northern Atlantic world, shifting the idea of justice for women out of the register of utopia to make it, for a few highly politicized women in the age of revolution, a plausible goal in the here and now. Thus, in 1776, Abigail Adams admonished her patriot husband, away in Philadelphia at the Continental Congress, to remember the ladies in their declarations, a nudge tempered by coyness but at heart quite serious. Later, in Paris, groups of women in the early days of the Revolution protested, unsuccessfully, their exclusion from representation and the franchise. And the excitement of the revolutionary debate in France stirred the young English writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who was trying to earn her own living outside a mans household. In 1792 she produced, in a few red-hot months, her sensational Vindication of the Rights of Women, the first full-scale argument for womens equality. The Americans of the middle of the nineteenth century knew little or nothing about these earlier claims and events, which were erased by the revanche against the French Revolution. The intertwined devils of Jacobinism and sexual irregularity tainted the reputation of Wollstonecraft, who died in 1797 giving birth to a child out of wedlock. (The baby grew up to be Mary Shelley. The Vindication passed out of print, and with it any knowledge that a woman had spent concentrated intellectual labor in reflection upon the oddity of her sexs inability to profit from the universal rights of man. The absence of an accessible tradition makes the Americans resourcefulness all the more remarkable. In the 1830s, a few firebrands of gender subversion wandered around the English-speaking world, representatives of the utopian socialist fringe where revolutionary womens rights still flickered: Fanny Wright, for example, a labor radical and an early advocate of contraception. Yet such sensations operated at a remove from the respectable ladies who called the meeting at SENECA FALLS. For them, there was no living memory of advocacy for womens rights. In the 1830s, as the struggle to end slavery accelerated, women in the inner circles of abolitionism began to stretch the metaphor of enslavement to encompass their own situations. The energy of extrapolation, rather than the confidence of tradition, galvanized their thinking. The analogy of woman and slave was by turns histrionic, sentimental, and brilliantly revealing, given all the actual ways in which men had the ability to coerce and to constrain wives and daughters, and given the legal fact that wives and daughters were, to some degree, the property of their husbands and fathers. Thine in the bonds of womanhood, the Southern ex-slaveholding renegade Sarah Grimke signed each of her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1838), a paraphrase of the bonds of slavery designed to detonate regular provocations throughout the text. The controversy over womens proper role was one of several differences that split the abolitionist movement in the 1830s. The nub of the issue was a womans right to follow the dictates of her conscience into public protest. The conversion of Sarah Grimke and her sister Angelina, daughters of a leading South Carolina family, to the cause immediately made them prized speakers on the antislavery circuit. Yet the prohibitions against women exposing themselves to audiences including men were so strong that leading New England clergymen threatened to withdraw their support from the movement unless the Grimkes retired. In free black circles, too, women became dedicated antislavery activists: Maria Stewarts public lectures aroused concerted opposition from African American men, as Suzanne Marilley discovers in her interesting book. The radicals led by William Lloyd Garrisonthe immediatists who pressed for an unconditional end to slaverybacked the Grimkes. The moderates in antislavery politicsgradualists who believed in courting mainstream opinionlined up with the clergy to send the women back home. The ruckus spread through the ranks, carried by the fevered gossip of protest politics as well as by Sarah Grimkes published Letters, a truculent rejoinder to the ministers. The result can be glimpsed in a letter from 1841, reprinted early on in Ann D. Gordons captivating first volume of Elizabeth Cady STANTONs and Susan B. Anthonys papers. Elizabeth Cady STANTON came of age in upstate New York, a hotbed of all sorts of reform, where the debate over womans nature was a muted clamor in the background. Newly married to Henry STANTON, an antislavery pragmatist who had broken with Garrison, STANTON refused to abjure her own loyalties to the womens rights wing of abolition. In language echoing Sarah Grimkes, the young wife declared herself preeminently an independent morally responsible being, answerable not to her husband but to a higher authority. I do in truth think act for myself deeming that I alone am responsible for the sayings doings of E. C. S. Elizabeth Cady STANTON was twenty-four when this volume of the Selected Papers begins. She was the daughter of a distinguished and well-heeled family: her mother was from the great New York land-holding Livingston clan, her father made his name in politics and the law. She benefited from the best education available to girls in antebellum America, which meant access to a good library (her fathers) and a stint at Emma Willards boarding school for girls, which was the first attempt to provide a serious curriculum beyond the ladies academies regime of French and music. No college and no career awaited a student upon leaving Willards, and so, in the early 1840s, the newlywed settled into provincial domesticity. Voracious for life and ideas, Mr. STANTONs wife must have been a handful. On the honeymoon trip that she and Henry took in 1840 to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, he found her capacity for fearless conversation irritating. Henry admonished her, she dutifully wrote a cousin, for her lack of discretion; she was too gay, she talked too much, she professed her views on slavery before people who knew much more than she did. Yet Lucretia Mott, an older Quaker abolitionist of great distinction, found her enchanting, an open generous confiding spirit. The two immediately forged a bond. In London, the British forbade the women to participate in the convention and cordoned them off in a balcony behind a curtain, setting off a bitter floor fight that the Garrison faction lost. STANTON and Mott sat in seclusion with the others for three days and fumed. They vowed to hold a meeting on womens rights when they returned to the States. But the plan lay fallow for years: Philadelphia was a long way from upstate New York, and STANTON was preoccupied with having babiesthere would be seven over the course of nineteen years, the last in 1859and managing a large household. Throughout the 1840s, there was scant letter-writing. STANTON seems to have bided her time at the edge of history, waiting to jump. Like other abolitionists, she had an acute sense of historical calling that translated, psychologically, into a belief that it was only a matter of time before her own hunger for change became general. She seldom fell prey to the dissenters depleting fear that her grievances were superfluous. She was sociable, and blessed with an optimistic outlook. She was also given to cheerful indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh: guiltless overeating (by the 1850s she was plump, and heading toward obesity) and perhaps guiltless sex (the marriage was chilly, but the seven babies make one wonder). They say I am good natured, generous, always well happy, she matter-of-factly informed a friend. She popped out most of her babies with aplomb: a twelve-pound Margaret was born after STANTON lay down for fifteen minutes. As a mother, she was confident and warm, particularly intelligent and loving, Ellen DuBois tells us in her biography of STANTONs second daughter, Harriot. When Mott visited relatives nearby in the summer of 1848, STANTON mobilized immediately. She may or may not have read Mary Wollstonecraft, but in any case she knew exactly the place in history that she wished to stake out: the first womans rights convention that has ever assembled, she stressed to a neighbor. Her circle of friends, crack political organizers by virtue of their years in what Suzanne Marilley nicely terms the free space of Garrisonian antislavery work, threw together the meeting in three days. They worried that the attendance would be small: it was high summerbusy on the farms, hot and slow in town. Yet a substantial crowd gathered, about two-thirds women and one-third men. The Declaration of Sentiments produced at SENECA FALLS went far beyond Wollstonecrafts Vindication in its list of injustices. In lofty abolitionist-inspired rhetoric, the signers pointed out that women were legally the subjects of their husbands and fathers; that wives could not hold property in their own names; that divorce was an economic and social disaster for women; that they could not go to college or become doctors, lawyers, or clergy; that no decently paid work was open to them; and so forth. The culprit was man: He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God. The perpetrators identity remained vague, a generic despot; but the pressure of the Declarations specific grievances was to make actual male people responsible. This conception of the effects of male power over women came from the images of subjugation in Grimkes Letterstake your feet off our backs, Grimke urged her male readers, and let us stand upright on the ground God designed us to occupyand produced a detailed view of the resulting social debilities. In retrospect, it marked a turning point. For Wollstonecraft had little use for her sex as it was presently constituted: the Vindication tended to blame either womens supposedly thwarted characters or the lack of reasonable education for the handicaps that they suffered. The Declaration of Sentiments, by contrast, was a firm defense of women as they were, poised to exercise their God-given capacities were it not for men. In its implicit ideas about the workings of power, you catch a faint echo of the clarion call of 1848: The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. The remedies for which the signatories called were vague, tending toward a call for moral enlightenment for both men and women; but there was one point that was precise and political. This was the demand for womens suffrage, and it was STANTONs special contribution. The idea was startling. Women in revolutionary France had raised the issue, but nobody in England or America had ever broached it. Some of the organizers balked at the proposal; but Frederick Douglass, who attended the meeting, threw his considerable moral weight behind STANTON, and the resolution prevailed. It was the harbinger of a program that would eventually hold out to its participants, first in the United States, then in Britain, and then throughout the world, the epochal promise of equalizing, and even obliterating, the social effects of sexual difference. Susan B. Anthony was not at SENECA FALLS, though she lived nearby. Slightly younger than STANTON, Anthony was a schoolteacher in 1848, working to support herself and to help out with the failing fortunes of her debt-ridden family. Raised as a Quaker and sent, in the familys prosperous years, to a good Quaker boarding school for girls, Anthony was also up-to-date on abolition and reform, but her need to earn a living kept her from active involvement. In the contrasting textures of Anthonys and STANTONs letters in Selected Papers, more vivid differences also appear. Despite her provincial base, STANTON moved in a cosmopolitan Anglo-American milieu, intellectually and socially; her mind stretched to Harriet Taylor, John Stuart Mill, and Jane Eyre. Anthonys world, the upstate countryside, was a universe of pigs and parsnips, of the homey concerns of a large struggling family. The epistolary styles of the early correspondence are wonderfully revealing: STANTONs letters are lifted by the swooping cadences that the great nineteenth-century political minds used even in their most intimate letters, Anthonys letters are knotted intricately in the everyday particulars of money, work, and sickness. Do write very soon, she adjures the folks, tell me about the strawberries peaches, cherries plums. Joseph talks some of going with us going to his fathers Joshua and Elisha want to come too. I guess I will come home live this winter let Mary and Merritt go to Washington Co. The marvel is that Anthony ever lifted her head from her appointed furrow. It was difficult for anyone to extricate any kind of self from this kin-based country life of thick obligations, dependencies, and anxieties, but it was virtually impossible for a woman to do so. STANTONs difficulties in grabbing time away from her household to read and to write are more easily appreciable now: they are a little resonant with our own dilemmas of bourgeois busyness. But it was Anthony, the unmarried sister whose labor and time were claimed not by one family but by several, who had the harder time launching herself. It seems to me that no one feels that it is any thing out of the common course of things, for me to sacrifice my every feeling, almost principle, to gratify those with whom I have chance to mingle, she complained of one stint helping out a relative. Yet slowly she crafted an independent life, helped by her friendship with STANTON, which began in 1851. First in temperance work, and then in abolitionism combined with womens rights, Anthony found her voice as a speaker and her genius as an organizer. From her complicated, dutyridden family life she brought to political work a habit of altruism and a focus on details. Anthonys later persona in the womens movement was so much the workhorsethe stoic mother of us all, as Gertrude Stein called herthat it is jolting to realize that she was not yet thirty when she threw in her lot with the cause. She worked incessantly, often traveling alone by coach or even on foot. Although she seldom noted the costs, the stress of her young life can be glimpsed in her letters: the penny-pinching of organizational funds, the slogging on bad roads, the miserable crowds at lectures, the loneliness, the struggle to support herselfall that went into the cold hard labor of which she complained in a low moment. The Selected Papers uphold a nowcommon view of STANTON as the brains of the pair and Anthony as the dogsbody organizer, but the books offerings deepen the meaning of both roles. This was a different political and intellectual world, in which the determination to eradicate the evil of slavery gave drive and authority to all sorts of American lives, mixing up ideas and politics. The friendship had the consequence of attaching some of STANTONs intellectual boldness to Anthony the schoolteacher-organizer, and some of Anthonys political acumen to STANTON the cerebral housewife. Anthony thrilled to STANTONs leaps of the mind; and their sallies into the world helped to transform STANTON from a bold thinker into a political swashbuckler. In the human soul, the steps between discontent and action are few and short indeed, she once observed to her abolitionist cousin Gerrit Smith; and it was in large part Anthony who helped her to compress the distance. In the 1850s, each moved from the edges to the center of radical reform. STANTON did so by means of her prominence at SENECA FALLS, which instituted a loose organization for womens rights embodied in annual conventions. Anthony became a paid organizer for anti-slavery. The renewed interest in women was so strong in the ranks that female lecturers sometimes alternated topics: one night slavery, the next womens rights. The new pride of status, coupled with the exhilarating new friendship, unleashed in these extraordinary women a torrent of work that continued unabated through the Civil War. The political culture of the 1850s provided audiences with an enormous sense of political efficacy (even for disenfranchised women), and a rich repertoire of metaphors and images: of bondage, which STANTON translated into the mental bondage of undereducated, housebound women, and of universal democracy, the redolent term for a consortium of rights-bearing individuals. Ann Gordons subtitle for this first volume of the STANTON-Anthony Papers, In the School of Anti-Slavery, is apt, for Northeastern reform politics at midcentury were indeed a huge pedagogical effort in reasoning, arguing, writing, orating, and storytelling. STANTON and Anthony learned from their fellows a method that was closely reasoned and argumentative (rather than exhortatory and denunciatory, in the twentieth-century mode of left-wing persuasion). Long speeches and long articles geared to patient audiences turned upon the enunciation of a series of errors, refuted point by point to listeners accustomed to sitting for hours. A fair sample of the method can be gleaned from STANTONs first public address on womens rights, delivered right after SENECA FALLS. She states a mistaken idea (let us consider mans claims to physical superiority), then circles around it, raising a calm objection, a commonsensical point, some shrewd reversal of accepted wisdom. Men are intellectually superior, Satan picked the weaker sex for his designs, women are satisfied with things as they are: little is left of these hoary claims when she is done. Even the easily verified point that the Bible tells wives to obey their husbands seems shaky after STANTON has worked over Genesis and Pauls epistles. These speeches and writings are heavy going today, but even a cursory look shows how intrepidly and efficiently STANTON, with Anthony close behind, cut her way through the defense of the status quo to occupy her own intellectual redoubt. In the 1850s, the vote was only one concern among many. Searching for a pure liberal lineage for feminism, recent writers have suggested that this early movement kept itself away from the task of changing private life, but nothing could be farther from the truth. In the 1850s, womens rights leaders used the metaphor of bondage to argue that disenfranchisement was inextricable from womens relegation to the home. Anthony eventually settled on the vote as sufficient, but STANTON never lost the drive to peer into the crevices of private life. What do you women want? : this volume of papers shows that she raised the rhetorical question years before Freud put it slightly differently; and unlike Freud, she went on to speculate on why they didnt get it. The pedagogy of abolition helped both women in the 1850s to entertain simultaneous, even contradictory, ardors. The vote was their passion, but they also challenged differences between the sexes that even friends and compatriots tolerated as natures inevitabilities. It was the unjust nature of marriage for women that quickly became STANTONs hobby horse. The Participial Adjective Part of English EssayLet the eccentrics, the untutored, the politically suspect come on, she wrote her new ally: politically, I would rather make a few blunders from a superabundance of life than to have all the proprieties of a well embalmed mummy. Woodhulls superabundance of life sprang from both her suffrage extremism and her willingness to talk about sex. A veteran of the rough gender economy of seedy boarding-houses, she had a bred-in-the-bones appreciation for the part that mens social and sexual privileges played in the system of inequality. Yet she did not conclude that men should be reined in, which was the womens rights position. She concluded that women should be let loose. With a daughters eagerness to kick over the traces, she denounced marriage as legalized prostitution and advocated a philosophy of free love, a branch of utopian socialism that championed the womans right to sexual fulfillment separated from child-bearing. (This idea made free-lovers the prescient champions of contraception. ) Free-lovers spurned legal marriageit coerced what should be freely givenand argued for a heterosexual union close to our own notions of living together, a higher monogamy outside marriage that could be dissolved at will. At the edgesand Woodhull skirted the edgesthe ideal of a higher monogamy could stray into the realm of serial, even multiple partners. All this made free love tantamount to prostitution in the minds of the respectable. Still, Woodhulls wildness appealed to STANTON. She had been moving toward similar conclusions about marriage (though the lurid metaphor of legalized prostitution had not yet occurred to her), but she was on her own: even Anthony, loyal as she was, struggled against her distaste for her friends preoccupation with sexual matters. Woodhull, a shady lady who had schooled herself in a world of anarchists and utopian socialists into which STANTON had never ventured, brought vitality to the older womans intuitions and meditations. But STANTONs embrace of a loose woman outraged her political enemies all the more. The Boston group in particular looked to draw blood. STANTON was too big a target, but not Woodhull. And Woodhull was aware that there was danger in several quarters. As Goldsmith shows, the rival womens rights factions were not the only ones who saw their chance as Woodhull shifted from suffrage to advocating free love. There were also the resentful members of her family. In 1873, Woodhull made a spectacular admission to a packed New York house: Yes! I am a free lover! I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love for as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please! This crippled Woodhulls viability as a speaker, transforming her in the public mind from a personage evoking the liminality of the stage actress to a self-confessed harlot. Desperate and angry, Woodhull played the hand that proved her undoing. In a monthly paper, she and her sister published the revelation of an adulterous liaison between the charismatic minister Henry Ward Beecher, scion of the eminent reformer family, and his parishioner Elizabeth Tilton. The affair was common knowledge among the reformer sophisticates of Manhattan and Beechers Brooklyn Heights church; and so were the dalliances of Libby Tiltons husband Theodore, an up-and-coming newspaperman, liberal politico, and one of STANTON and Anthonys stalwarts. But Woodhull charged that Beecher and his cronies were hypocrites for repudiating publicly the ethos that they privately enjoyed. Free love seems to have become the rage in Brooklyn Heights, a moony opportunism that justified serial infidelities, mens and womens, in an age when divorce was next to impossible. The explicit nature of the revelations, coupled with Beechers success in cleaning up his reputation in the long divorce trial that followed, sealed Woodhulls fate. Hounded by the vice crusader Anthony Comstock for her obscene lectures and her writings about free love, she was indicted and jailed repeatedly over the next few years. For all of Goldsmiths assiduous research into the historical context, her portrait of Woodhull is flat. It falls back into a line of sensationalized journalistic depictions of the fabulous siren: a backwoods original, an entrepreneur and con artist, a self-promoter devoid of inner life. Goldsmith is too unskeptical about the scandal-mongering against Woodhull; and she is weirdly uninterested in relationships between women and in the drama of womens rights, in which Woodhull created a starring role for herself. Thus she ends up demoting a rich political conjuncture into a tale of gullibility and opportunism. Even New York Citya historic refuge of plotters, conspirators, and flamboyant radicalscould not provide Woodhull sanctuary. None of her new acquaintances came to her aid, not even STANTON. Woodhull sank down to the dim lower levels of the lecture circuit. By 1877, America was no good for her. She moved to England, where her old skills landed her a rich Londoner named John Martin, who set her up, a respectable lady for the first time in her life, in a fine big establishment in the substantial suburb of Kensington. Despite her husbands valiant efforts, London society shunned her. Goldsmith does not say so, but among those who would have chosen not to visit would have been the Martins neighbors at Hyde Park Gate, the eminent critic Leslie Stephen and his wife Julia. There, on the little sealed loop of a street, where everybody knew everything about everybody, and all the residents took their daily walks, we may spot (thanks to Hermione Lees Virginia Woolf) Mrs. Martin. We may see her as the small, curious Virginia saw her, out of the corner of her eye, a shadowy figure draped in her mothers suspicions of a somehow infamous suffragist past. How Woolf, with her second sense of a secret history of women which drifted through the London streets, would have loved the story! How she would have kindled to the evanescent metropolitan moment when that odd, dashing female past glanced against her own gathering feminist present! III. The vote was not won until 1919, but other demands for equality were achieved in the late nineteenth century, including the opening of higher education to women. Newly-founded womens colleges and coeducational public universities sent out self-consciously New Women to work in the world as doctors, businesswomen, settlement house residents, artists, professors. This was the first generation of middle-class women to choose paid work over what one of their number, Jane Addams, called the family claim. They were going to matter in the world. In the 1880s, the small Virginia Stephen and the middle-aged Mrs. Martin lived in a London where (Woolf later recalled wryly) a respectable woman was as likely to be seen alone in town as to walk outside in a dressing gown carrying a bath sponge. Similar rules of seclusion held in the United States. In both countries, however, they were buckling under the to-ings and fro-ings of New Women, independent-minded and often marriage-spurning daughters. One of the beneficiaries of the changing dispensation was Elizabeth Cady STANTONs daughter Harriot. Primed with her mothers fierce pride (STANTON modestly enjoined her daughter to love and work for humanity, to go on with my work when I am done, to make life easier in any direction for those who come after you), she received a stiff education at Vassar and then went on to Europe, where she imbibed the latest currents in the social sciences and soon married Harry Blatch, a kindly Englishman. Marriage and two daughters scarcely slowed her: she plunged into politics, working with the British suffragists at the point when votes for women were inseparable from broader issues of enfranchisementa historical moment that resonated with her mothers first involvement in the issue in the 1850sand then, briefly, with the Fabians. The Fabians were hostile to womens rights, but the mixing of labor, socialist, and womens concerns in concrete legislative proposalsand especially the keen interest in the plight of working womentaught her a practical and inclusive approach to electoral politics that went far beyond the strategies in use in the United States. When Blatch returned to America in 1896, Ellen Carol DuBois suggests, she was uniquely equipped by virtue of her maternal heritage and, more important, by the intellectual receptivity that heritage had bequeathed her, to become a leader in transforming womens rights into its twentieth-century incarnation as feminism. In America, Blatch found a stultifying suffrage movement that bored its devotees and repelled its opponents: Most of the ammunition was being wasted on its supporters in private drawing rooms and in public halls where friends, drummed up and harried by the ardent, listlessly heard the same old arguments. Still, distinct from this network of staid matrons was an inchoate milieu of young New Women who defined themselves by the modernist term feminism. Imported from France, feminism denoted youth, psychology, sex, financial independence, self. And elements of the marginalized nineteenth-century critique of marriage resurfaced, this time with broader appeal to a generation more interested in expressing female sexual desire than in containing men. Blatch swiftly attached herself to this milieu and reinvigorated the scene in the city. She organized an Equality League, a small but influential group that brought together some of New Yorks most brilliant New Women professionals with gifted working women and labor organizers from the trades. The focus was on the bond that joined employed women across class lines, on the conviction that paid work, since it freed women from economic dependence on men, was the necessary basis for sex equality. The feminist movement of the nineteenth century had treated the working woman as a pitiable victim, imagined quintessentially as the starving seamstress in her garret. But feminists in the early twentieth century promoted a spirited, youthful working woman as the exemplar of emancipation, the feisty rebel girl of the picket lines to be admired, emulated, and supported. The tinge of youthful hope, the emphasis on a destiny outside marriage, the scornful rejection of conventional womanhood: all this went into the militant suffragism of the rebellious daughters. By the early 1910s, suffragism was one of the largest and most varied democratic movements in the countrys history, encompassing a cast of characters that stretched far beyond the stalwart mothers of the nineteenth century. The superabundance of life with which STANTON had flirted now materialized in a politics that combined intellectual force with social eclecticism. Recruits from the socialists, the trade unions, African American groups, and the immigrant Left worked for the vote. Disgruntled high society ladies mixed with working women, New Women all. The militant movement that again surged out of New York City took womens rights into the era of modern electoral politics. There was plenty of the plain, dead-ahead slogging at which Anthony had excelled; Blatch learned the arts of legislative lobbying and door-to-door electioneering. Yet the range greatly expanded. Late-Victorian ladies had kept politics safely indoors, where they protected themselves from exposure to the smearing public eye. Blatch and her contemporaries took their campaign outdoors, in marvelous outdoor parades (all dressed in white marching down Fifth Avenue) and coast-to-coast all-female automobile entourages. They tapped the enlivening properties of commercial culture with suffrage hats, suffrage postcards, suffrage dances, even suffrage movies. The feminism of the daughters made some room for a feminism of the sons. The enthusiasm was contagious, and blended with the optimistic American spirit of the new. Even liberals and progressivesespecially young menwho ten years earlier would have been cool to the suffrage issue now warmed to its promise. At the The New Republic, just founded and buoyant with modern sensibilities, the editors gave over an issue in October 1915 to rousing support for the New York State campaign that Blatch orchestrated. A string of male pundits proclaimed the value, the importance, the necessity of votes for women. Walter Lippmann, a card-carrying suffragist since his days at Harvard, believed that a great deal of change between men and women was in the works and he welcomed it. In an essay deeply sympathetic to feminism, he made suffrage the centerpiece of an all-embracing program: At bottom the struggle might almost be described as an effort to alter the tone of peoples voices and the look in their eyes. But that means an infinitely greater change, a change in the initial prejudice with which men and women react towards each other and the world. Thought will not flow freely and inventively so long as it runs in the narrow channels of the older tradition. Rather remarkably, Lippmann proves to have been the first advocate of the no-more-nice-girls idea: This change women cannot bring about by being nice girls, dancing well, dressing well, becoming adept in small talk, marrying an honest man, supervising a servant, and seeing that the baby is clean, healthy and polite. They have to take part in the wider affairs of life. Their demand for the vote expresses that aspiration. Such encouraging male counterpartsfrom The New Republic, the radical Masses, whereverwere brothers to be welcomed. Older womenthe mothers so committed to the niceness that the daughters were fleeingwere more problematic. Suffrage veterans disliked the feminists sexually adventurous spirit and their eagerness to defy ideals of feminine propriety. For the new generation, however, the repudiation of older womens timidity before the gender status quo seemed a virtual requirement of the modern spirit. Ellen Carol DuBois has done more than any contemporary historian to bring to life the history of suffrage politics, and she sees a great deal at stake in these efforts to preserve the sense of a complex historical legacy. She is exquisitely attuned to the undertow of disaffiliation between women in this high-flying political moment. Blatch, the paradigmatic daughter, was one of the few to see that repudiation of past womens efforts was not without its costs, that it depleted the present as well as emancipated it. For her, the challenge of finding a relationship to the legacy of the nineteenth century was personal and political. Blatch needed to be her own person as well as her mothers daughter, and she resolved this dilemma politically, by extending her sense of feminism beyond her mothers reachinto issues of womens paid work, for example, that the latter was ill-fitted to understand. At the same time, Blatch sensed that her mothers most heterodox ideas, spurned by her Victorian contemporaries, resonated with the requirements of female modernity. She deeply resented Susan Anthonys ascendancy, and the secondary status to which her mother had been relegated in the history of suffrage. She worked hard to restore the full range of STANTONs thought, which had been excised and pruned away to fit the single-issue focus of the late-nineteenth-century campaign. For Blatchs most searching feminist contemporaries, discovering the breadth and the complexity of STANTONs ideas was exhilarating. I have longed to rush in upon you with my excitement over your mother, the historian Mary Beard wrote Blatch after having raced through the collection of STANTONs papers that Blatch had amassed and deposited at the Library of Congress. Every item in those folders excites me. Here was a usable past that billowed out from the confines of Victorian maternalism. Even the reputation of Victoria Woodhull, whose role in suffragism had been consistently suppressed in the official history of the movement, made a comeback after her death in 1927; and STANTON, whose devotion to Woodhull had been held against her for thirty years in the suffrage movement, gained luster through the association. IV. This saga of generation and memory, of mothers and daughters, is the standard by which the convulsions of contemporary feminismor rather, postfeminismmust be measured. We are the heirs of a great tradition of intelligence, courage, and imagination; but you would not know it from the post-feminism that surrounds us. Characterizing Harriot Blatchs self-understanding when she was just out of Vassar, Ellen DuBois nicely captures the mentality: young, self-confident, and sure she had never experienced discrimination by sex, a century later she would have been called a postfeminist, exhibiting in equal measure arrogance and naivete about the condition of her sex. The postfeminist of the 1990s revolts against a fantasy of traditional feminists as older, puritanical, limiting, hectoringthe tight-lipped, overly serious, disapproving mothers. Indeed, the generational tension seems a little familiar. Here, again, surely, is a feminism of the daughters. But it is not that at all, because this construction of womanhood is fundamentally timid and trivial. A career decision, a wardrobe decision, a cosmetic-surgery decision: these are the occasions for the postfeminist call-to-arms. Sisters, fight for the legitimacy of your lingerie! Do not surrender your nail polish to the prudish mothers! You are free to swish your hips! Contemporary postfeminist writingsnotably the recent books by Katie Roiphe, Karen Lehrman, and Elizabeth Wurtzelbelong to the literature of adolescence rather than the literature of ideas. They confuse sex with life, as adolescents do. They are driven mainly by appearances. They are unable to grasp the requirements of the world outside the self. They defend little and they build nothing. From these books the misogynists and the enemies of equality have nothing to fear. In the hands of the postfeminists, even Elizabeth Cady STANTON, the champion of dress reform, the inveterate foe of mens power over womens self-esteem, the fierce analyst of the ways in which the coercive power of men over women disguised itself within marriage, is complacently enlisted as just another advocate of female self-improvement. In this readingwhich is really the consequence of a lack of readingSTANTON joins Sharon Stone in a single sacred sisterhood. The strenuous worldview at the heart of the feminist tradition has been usurped by the epicene worldview of the womens magazines, which hides its indifference to critical thinking, its substitution of psychology for politics, its prescriptions for conformity, its enslavement of women to style, all behind the good and complicated name of feminism. This is not the feminism of the daughters. It is the feminism of the girls. Not bad girls, just girls; shrewd, not rebellious; ostensibly brazen, but essentially anxious. Confronted with these whining and self-indulgent outbursts, one longs for the spirit of SENECA FALLS, for the imagination, the empathy, and the ingenuity of the past, for the superabundance of life that is feminisms legacy. By Christine Stansell Christine Stansell is Professor of History at Princeton University. Her new book, American Moderns, will be published next spring. Copyright of New Republic is the property of New Republic and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holders express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. Source: New Republic, 08/10/98, Vol. 219 Issue 6, p26, 12p, 3bw. Item Number: 888132 Many strong and varied reform movements took root and flourished in the Northern United States in the decades before the Civil War. Abolitionism and a movement for womens rights arose in these years; temperance and moral reform crusades garnered both male and female supporters; utopian communities and other diverse religious groups strove to perfect society; and varied health reforms, from hydropathy to vegetarianism to homeopathy, promised to provide a safer and healthier alternative to treatments offered by regular physicians. In this reform atmosphere, it is not surprising that a movement began to free women from the restrictive clothing of the antebellum period; in fact, many of these reform currents contributed to the movement to reform womens dress.