In this recent contribution to the “Pivotal Moments in American History” series, McMillen provides a concise overview of the woman's rights movement from its inaugural convention at Seneca Falls, NY in 1848 to the ratification of the nineteenth amendment in 1920. Although its focus is appropriately directed toward the struggle for female suffrage, it emphasizes the crucial relationship between the women's movement and precedent reform movements out of which its central leaders emerged – the temperance movement and the abolitionist movement. The temperance movement provided an urgent impulse to divorce reform, and the struggle for abolition and freedmen's suffrage provided both an impetus and a model for the ongoing campaign for full female equality.

Sources for the text are drawn from the letters and papers of the four most influential women in the movement – Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Lucy Stone. The volume includes two useful appendices – the full text of the “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments” from the 1848 convention, and Stanton's 1892 address to the Committee of the Judiciary, “Solitude of the Self.”

There is little here to challenge the scholarly reader and the book should find its primary audience with the general reader or as a collegiate student text. For the latter readership, however, its narrative treatment of reform is largely undocumented. This is particularly evident in the chapter “Fashioning a Better World” (35–70). There is also no bibliography to provide guidance for further study. In places transitions are jarringly disruptive – the shift from the discussion of the Beecher–Tilton affair to the participation of women in the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition (192–93), for example.

McMillen's “warts-on” consideration of the movement is at times overly condemnatory. Of the “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments” she cites modern perceptions of the document as “undemocratic, even uncharitable” (91), but when compared to its prototype – the Declaration of Independence – it appears much more consonant with basic American values. The failure to note that one college was coeducational – Oberlin admitted a few women after 1837 – does not significantly contradict the document's overtly tendentious contention that “all colleges … [are] closed against her” (238).

While McMillen acknowledges the international aspect of the women's movement, she does not sufficiently recognize the degree to which the foundations of the American movement were rooted in precedent movements in France and Great Britain and the influence that the revolutions of 1848 had on Seneca Falls. Indeed, in a passage from Stanton's address to the convention, she quite explicitly refers to contemporary European upheavals and anoints Joan of Arc as a heroic model for American women.