Teresa Anne Murphy's Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States is an important new book on United States women's history. A must-read for anyone who cares about the historiography of early American women's history, Murphy's book examines the evolution of women's history from the late eighteenth century to the Civil War. It devotes “particular attention to how competing ideas of women's citizenship were central to the ways in which those histories were constructed” (2). As Murphy notes, “Earlier histories that criticized the economic practices, intellectual abilities, and political behavior of women in the past created a narrative of exclusion that legitimated the differentiated citizenship considered suitable for women” (3). Part I of the book “analyzes how the discourse of women, history, and nation was created and contested in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (8). Part II “focuses on the ways in which women's history was used more overtly in debates about women's citizenship as woman's rights activism began to take hold in the 1830s” (9).

Murphy argues that the history of women in the United States must be, and has been, updated periodically to support successive movements for women's rights. As Murphy puts it, “The demands for full citizenship that permeated the movement for woman's rights in the 1850s required a wide ranging reevaluation of social relations. And social relations, in order to be legitimate, needed a history” (1). The book asserts that this need to rewrite women's history to support women's rights advocacy was true of both the first and second waves of the United States women's rights movement, with her focus largely on the former.

I was not fully persuaded by Murphy's argument that a reframing or retelling of women's history was essential to the development of the mid-nineteenth century women's rights movement. Whereas I agree with Murphy that “[f]ull citizenship implied universal rights, [and that] the acquisition of those rights necessitated changes in the terms by which women were included in society” (1), her argument that these changes necessitated a rewriting of women's history was not ultimately convincing. Therefore, I did not agree with her assertion that “[Thomas Wentworth] Higginson was right in thinking that supporters of woman's rights would need to revise current statistics and rewrite history in order to make the argument for such societal changes” (1). Likewise, I was not persuaded when she concluded that “specific demands for woman's rights fostered new variations in the way women were imagined in the past” (99).

In developing her argument, Murphy focuses, inter alia, on Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), Judith Sargent Murray's essays in The Gleaner (1796–98), Lydia Maria Child's History of the Condition of Women (1835), Sarah Grimke's “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes” (1836–37), Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1844), and Caroline Dall's work on the woman's rights newspaper, The Una (1855), and publication of Historical Pictures Retouched (1860). Murphy dispatches Wollstonecraft and Murray quickly, noting that Wollstonecraft “simply dismissed history as worthless for her project of critiquing the condition of women,” whereas Murray “tried to create an alternative history of female citizenship” that was quickly forgotten (4). Focusing instead on Childs, Dall, and others, Murphy declares that “what was crucial for a re-visioning of women's history was the sustained assault on the limitation of women's status as citizens that began in the 1830s” (4). This, then, would appear to turn Murphy's argument on its head by asserting that the first wave of the women's rights movement was essential to the rewriting of history.

Childs, Dall, and others played a critical role in the mid-nineteenth century women's rights movement, according to Murphy, by “challenging the orthodoxies of women's history” that “had been central in constructing arguments for domestic citizenship,” including the ideology of republican motherhood (70). As a result, “a new strain of women's history began to circulate, challenging the types of gender differences in citizenship that had previously been upheld as necessary to national progress” (71). Murphy characterizes Child's History of the Condition of Women as “one of the most significant interventions in the creation of women's history during the nineteenth century” (74).

Murphy's thesis is a provocative one, if not fully persuasive, and her account of the place of mid-nineteenth century commentators in the women's rights movement is an important contribution to the historiography of United States women's history.