This collection of essays grew out of a conference commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Susan B. Anthony's death held in 2006 in Rochester, which was a hotbed of abolitionism and feminism, and home to both Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony. Because Susan B. Anthony has never claimed her fair share of scholarly attention, the conference organizers felt compelled to entertain a wider range of topics than the title of this collection would seem to suggest. As the editors explain, their theme is not Anthony but rather “the diversity of thought and action in American women's involvement in nineteenth-century reform movements” (ix). Editors Huth and Ridarsky have selected well and prepared their materials meticulously, while Nancy Hewitt provides a graceful introduction to pull together disparate essays. Three of seven essays do not deal with Susan B. Anthony at all. A fine essay by Alison Parker on the black suffragist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper describes a little-known phase of Harper's life when, in the 1880s, she tried to work within Frances Willard's Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) to persuade white women that true Christianity and the fight against alcohol required them to cross the color line. Another by Tara McCarthy describes how Irish American women took their first tentative steps into activism in the 1880s in a Parnell-inspired Ladies Land League in America. Finally, Melissa Ryan explores how late nineteenth-century woman suffragists reacted with both respect and condescension to gender roles among Native American women. There is nothing wrong with the quality of these three essays – on the contrary – but the strength of this collection comes out when the focus is on Anthony.

Laura Free discusses Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's unsuccessful campaign to persuade the 1867 New York State Constitutional Convention to enact universal citizenship suffrage. According to Free, Republican politicians argued for black men's voting rights using a rhetoric of shared “manhood,” and therefore the women's efforts were doomed from the start. But did Republicans believe their own rhetoric, or was it just a plausible line to cover the fact that their party needed southern black men's votes to hold on to power? Free is not intimidated by the details of political history that govern the possibilities of a given historical moment, and she is very good at unraveling their complexity. But she may miss an opportunity by focussing so much more on language than on power.

Kathi Kern makes a strong case that Susan B. Anthony's worldview reflected the traditions of the Hicksite Quakers among whom she was raised. Anthony said, “I pray with my work,” holding to an inward spirituality that was nonsectarian but powerful and sustaining (100). As in her book Mrs. Stanton's Bible, Kern understands that religion was a most vexed question dividing feminists in the late nineteenth century. While Stanton waded into controversy, Anthony remained detached, even serene – and for each, religion provides an angle of vision that helps explain both the content and the remarkable length of their activist careers. Unfortunately Kern lacks the space here for a full discussion of Matilda Joslyn Gage, whose anticlerical animus fuelled a bitter and significant challenge to Anthony's leadership.

In an essay anticipating her forthcoming book, Lisa Tetrault argues that, in the late nineteenth century, Susan B. Anthony was most crucially “a movement historian” who used the story of the women's movement to consolidate her influence and enhance her public image (15). She contends that Anthony's increasing editorial and financial control over the multivolume History of Woman Suffrage, which she coedited with Stanton and Gage, enabled Anthony to exclude rivals, suppress unflattering episodes, and portray herself as the indispensable leader. Tetrault suggests that Anthony did much the same thing with her own biography, working with the nominal author Ida Husted Harper, thus elevating her own importance and control. Tetrault's work is deeply researched and highly original, but she often relies on Matilda Joslyn Gage's version of disputed events without explaining why she finds Gage a reliable narrator. And her argument must contend with the obvious objection that (as Tetrault herself concedes) Anthony did not actually write much of the text in question (39).

In her authoritative essay “Knowing Susan B. Anthony,” Ann D. Gordon brings to bear knowledge gained over many years as the editor of The Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, both in the comprehensive forty-five-reel microfilm edition and in the six volumes of Selected Papers. Gordon organizes her essay around the many ways in which Anthony's story has been ignored or misappropriated. For example, she briskly dismisses antiabortion activists' claim that Anthony shared their views: there is simply “no evidence” that Anthony authored a key document that they attribute to her, while another quote they cite is obviously misinterpreted (225). Gordon provides an absorbing discussion of the Anthony biographies written for general audiences by Ida Husted Harper (1898), Rheta Childe Dorr (1928), and Kathleen Barry (1988), and puzzles over the fact that academic historians have failed to take up the challenge of providing a decent scholarly biography. She disagrees with Tetrault politely but firmly: “Although there is a popular idea circulating among historians that Susan B. Anthony was concentrating power in her own person in the years after 1887, the facts do not support the claim” (210). Gordon believes that Anthony retained leadership in that period not because she was self-promotional but because “no one with less seniority could hold the competing groups together” (210).

All four essays on Anthony are sophisticated and stimulating, and they whet one's appetite for more. The particularly interesting differences between Tetrault and Gordon point the way toward productive scholarly debate of the sort that can inspire valuable research and spark new insights about topics too long neglected. Thus while this volume gives evidence of the depth and maturity of scholarship on women's history, it also promises to push it even further.