In The Myth of Seneca Falls, historian Lisa Tetrault analyzes how Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony created an enduring “origins myth” for the women's rights movement. Celebrating the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 as the birth of the movement, Stanton and Anthony ensured their own place in the history of the cause by emphasizing their role as the founders and chief strategists of the movement. As historians of the movement, however, their contribution may have been even more significant. Creating a usable past for future generations of activists, they virtually erased from collective memory the efforts of their fellow suffrage advocates, most notably Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell. They also minimized the significance of female abolitionists who paved the way for nineteenth century women to become involved in politics in the first place.

In the first chapter, Tetrault examines the period from 1865 to 1870, when Lucretia Coffin Mott presided over the American Equal Rights Association (AERA). After passage of the Fifteenth Amendment —which enfranchised African American men, but not women—movement leaders differed bitterly on goals and strategies. These differences were exacerbated by Stanton and Anthony's uneasy alliance with wealthy entrepreneur and avowed racist, George Francis Train, who financed their controversial newspaper, The Revolution. In 1869, the AERA's leaders split into two new organizations, with Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell creating the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), while Stanton and Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Whereas the AWSA supported a state strategy for suffrage, the NWSA campaigned for a constitutional amendment. Tetrault argues that in these early years, Stanton and Anthony recognized the importance of who “inherited the past” (44), so they deliberately set out to shape historical memories of the movement.

The second chapter focuses on the early Reconstruction Era (1870–1873), a tumultuous period characterized by still more fragmentation. State and local suffrage organizations competed for women's support, whereas Stanton grew tired of movement politics and took to the lyceum circuit. Although Stanton continued to speak about women's rights on the lyceum, Tetrault suggests that the popularity of the lyceum distracted attention from the women's movement. Stanton's association with the scandalous Victoria Woodhull—an outspoken free love advocate—also distanced her from the movement. In May of 1873, Stanton and Anthony organized a twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the Seneca Falls convention, elevating it over the First National Women's Rights Convention of 1850 as the signature event of the suffrage cause. Ironically, Anthony had not even attended the Seneca Falls convention. Nevertheless, she emerged from this celebration as the “narrator and historian of a nascent myth, as important as any of the women who were actually at Seneca Falls” (72).

Chapter 3 describes a period of expansive growth in the women's movement, with the founding in 1874 of the largest and most successful women's organization of the nineteenth century: the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). As Stanton and Anthony redoubled their efforts to pass a constitutional amendment, Stone and her followers began advocating partial suffrage as a “more winnable, if gradual path to full suffrage” (103). The WCTU created problems for suffrage advocates, however, as many women considered temperance the more urgent issue. In response, Stanton and Anthony renewed their efforts to call attention to Seneca Falls, staging a “Third Decade Celebration” of the movement in Rochester in 1878. This period also marked Anthony's first attempt to rewrite women's history, as she penned several entries on the movement in Johnson's New Universal Cyclopaedia, a four volume reference work that included some of the most distinguished writers of the day.

In the fourth chapter, Tetrault evaluates the herculean efforts of Stanton, Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage in publishing the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage. These volumes, each more than 800 pages in length, constructed a narrative history that emphasized the accomplishments of the NWSA, while virtually ignoring Stone and her followers. The History remains the definitive account of the early women's movement, despite its obvious rhetorical purposes and biases.

The final chapter describes the lengthy negotiation behind the reunification of the women's movement under the banner of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890. The “merger was anything but harmonious,” Tetrault notes, as Stanton barely won election as its president, and disagreements over goals and strategies remerged. Increasingly disenchanted with politics, Stanton soon shifted her attention to writing her most controversial work, the Woman's Bible, and her memoir, Eighty Years and More. The backlash against the Woman's Bible and Stanton's autobiographical self-portrait further alienated Stanton from the mainstream movement. In the epilogue to the book, Tetrault reflects on the legacy of the “myth of Seneca Falls” in later debates over women's rights.

The Myth of Seneca Falls is meticulously researched and well written. It contributes to an understanding of how history is constructed rhetorically through narratives and myths, and it illustrates how savvy Stanton and Anthony were, not only as political activists but also as rhetorical historians. By selectively recalling the history of woman suffrage, Stanton and Anthony downplayed the factionalism that plagued the movement, and they shaped collective memories of the suffrage cause for centuries to come. At the same time, Tetrault reminds the reader that other women also made important contributions to the early suffrage movement. Her book provides inspiration for recovering their memories as well.