In 1892, Elizabeth Cady Stanton resigned as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Her resignation speech, the “Solitude of Self,” poignantly highlighted her unenviable position as an elderly, increasingly frail, widowed woman and her heightened awareness of women’s place in society. Most of what is contained within the speech are arguments and observations she (and others) had made in the past. But now, in her seventies, steadily losing her sight and increasingly dependent on others, women’s position in society came into still sharper focus. Stanton used the idea of the “solitude of self” to reveal how societal gender norms endangered women’s lives. She explained how everyone inevitably must face life’s greatest challenges alone, and how women have a greater disadvantage because they are unprepared for this inevitability. Women are expected to rely on the men in their lives instead of their own strength and intelligence, yet many women do not have or do not want, men to protect and guide them. In the end, “woman must rely on herself”; she “must be captain, pilot, engineer.”Footnote ¹ I was reminded of this quotation as I read Shannon M. Risk’s The Life and Times of Elizabeth Upham Yates: A Crusader for Women’s Suffrage, Temperance, and Missionary Work, which chronicles the life of one of Stanton’s allies in the fight for temperance and women’s rights. Risk argues that Yates, an ambitious and talented pioneer in the women’s movement, lost her place in the pantheon of second-generation suffragists. Risk’s biography of Yates, the first significant study of her life, is meant to correct that oversight—to “resurrect Yates’[s] life in context and to provide nuance into the general narrative of women’s history” (1). Risk is successful, and what unfolds is a life that exemplifies the disadvantages Stanton had described even as Yates demonstrates some of the new opportunities available to women after the Civil War.

Yates was born into a Methodist family that valued service and evangelism. She never married, which allowed her to follow a career path first as a missionary, and then as a progressive speaker, reformer, and organizer. Her first sojourn into the world of women’s rights came when she worked in Peking, China, for five years as a member of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, she devoted most of her efforts there to aiding local women by challenging the gendered world they inhabited, one where foot binding and child weddings were the norm. She was there in the role of evangelist, but she also assisted with providing medical care. On her return to the United States, and more sensitive now to societal constructs, she felt the sting of inequality for women in the Methodist Church. Unable to rectify the situation, she shifted her attention to reform work with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), NAWSA, and other local and state organizations. Over the next few decades, she added university student, public speaker (primarily on the issue of suffrage), and author to her list of accomplishments. Eventually, she was elected Chair for Presidential Suffrage in NAWSA (replacing Henry Blackwell) and President of the Rhode Island Equal Suffrage Association. She also helped found and grow temperance organizations in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, gave sermons in local churches, and ran for office (unsuccessfully). Speaking fees and income from rental property she owned facilitated this independent lifestyle. Her final decade saw that autonomy curtailed, though, as she faced the ravages of brittle bone disease, struggled to support herself, and lost a legal battle for a rightful inheritance from her friend and partner Sarah Usher.

The Life and Times of Elizabeth Upham Yates presents a chronological narrative, with each chapter devoted to a new adventure or challenge the missionary and reformer encountered. The book contains more than ten photos and a handy list of abbreviations, invaluable for those new to the subject. Risk utilizes a full range of primary and secondary sources, including ship manifests, government records, newspapers, the WCTU archives, suffrage organizations’ collections (including the NAWSA and Catt collections in the Library of Congress), historical societies (in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Maine), medical histories, regional histories, the papers and histories of church missionary societies, and biographies and autobiographies, as well as Yates’s papers, books, speeches, and letters.

Unfortunately, Yates, like many of her contemporaries, destroyed (or had destroyed) a sizable amount of her own records, leaving some frustrating gaps in the narrative. There are plentiful accounts of speeches, travels, day-to-day operations, tactics, and the like, but very little emotional content in the book. Yates left behind details of what happened, but very little of her reactions, emotions, yearnings, and personal interactions. Risk provides a comprehensive biography of Yates the missionary, the temperance worker, and the suffragist, but one that (through no fault of Risk’s) leaves the reader feeling disconnected from Yates the individual. Quotations from Yates are scarce until chapter five, and much of her story is told through the experiences of others. Even more discouraging, there is little information about her early life, and no knowledge available to explain why she made some of her more significant choices. For example, we have no idea why she moved to Rhode Island, or what role she played in caring for her father in his final years—and, most importantly, the impact it had on her work. Details about the exact nature of her relationship with Sarah Usher (friendship or “Boston Marriage”?) are lost, if they ever existed at all. And then there are the little tidbits found in Yates’ autobiography that entice the reader (and Risk) but are never explained, such as mentioning that she had purchased the freedom of a slave girl in China but providing no further information about it, and how it may have informed her career path.

The final chapter, “Towards the Setting Sun, 1920–1942: Battling Disability in Trying Times” provides a window into the precarious lives of single, divorced, and widowed women at that time in American history. Although Yates cringed at Stanton’s more “militant” words and actions, I think that in the last two decades of Yates’s life, whether she recognized it or not, she came to share Stanton’s feelings of helplessness and fear, not due to any particular failure of their own, but due to women’s enduring position in society. When a ship is sinking, gallant and selfless men load women and children first into the lifeboats. But once those boats are lowered into the water, few women have the knowledge and experience necessary to navigate themselves to safety. As Stanton argued in “The Solitude of Self,” “to guide our own craft, we must be captain, pilot, engineer.” Women like Stanton and Yates had the intelligence and drive necessary, but were hindered by unjust laws, societal norms, and expectations. We all must sail “towards the setting sun,” but some of us are better equipped to do so than others.Footnote ²