Lisa Tetrault's fascinating book The Myth of Seneca Falls makes a compelling argument for the importance of history. Tetrault uses the history of the women's suffrage movement to explain how Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton became historians of their own movement. Writing their own history of the suffrage movement, even as it was still unfolding, enabled them to highlight their own centrality to the struggle.

To tell her story about the importance of history and memory, Tetrault carefully rehearses some familiar ground, retelling the basic facts about the former abolitionists and universal-suffrage advocates who split into two factions at the 1869 American Equal Rights Association convention. The main point of contention was whether to accept the wording of the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed black male suffrage but left black and white women without any federal guarantees of their voting rights. Those who insisted on women's immediate enfranchisement, led by Stanton and Anthony, left the convention to form a new organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), dedicated to achieving women's enfranchisement via a Sixteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. Those who decided to support the Fifteenth Amendment as it was written, while also dedicating themselves to a state-by-state approach to achieving women's suffrage, included Lucy Stone, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and Henry Blackwell, who formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). Black women were awkwardly torn between these two factions, but generally chose to support black men's immediate access to the ballot, even as they committed themselves to gaining the vote for themselves as well.

Tetrault proves that Stanton, Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper used their monumental multivolume History of Woman Suffrage, which came out in four volumes from 1881 to 1922 (the last volume after the deaths of the first three authors), to make the case that the NWSA and its leaders were the true, original pioneers of the women's suffrage movement. Although many at the time saw the 1850 Worcester convention as the true start of a national movement, they lost their ability to claim that convention and its leaders as worthy of special commemoration after Anthony and Stanton successfully presented their authoritative history identifying the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 as the rightful birthplace of the movement. By deciding to write the History of Woman Suffrage in the early 1880s, long before woman suffrage was achieved, Anthony and Stanton managed to privilege their organization and leadership. They did so in part by including a huge number of primary sources which made the volumes appear to be objective and unbiased. They also included biographical sketches that strategically highlighted the leaders and participants who, after the 1869 split, joined the NWSA.

Lucy Stone and her allies in the AWSA, Tetrault convincingly argues, sorely misunderstood the power of history. Stone refused to contribute to or participate in her rivals' History of Woman Suffrage. She righteously declined to write her own counternarrative, saying she was too busy making history to write it. Even though there is a logic and virtue to this principled stance, Stone and the AWSA leadership paid a price even in their own lifetimes. Tetrault proves that the myth of the centrality of Seneca Falls and Stanton and Anthony soon came to be accepted as fact. When the time came to commemorate various events and milestones in the struggle for woman suffrage, the NWSA faction relied on the History of Woman Suffrage as objective proof of who and what had been most central to the movement.

Stanton and Anthony, as writers of their own histories, successfully positioned themselves as the inevitable leaders of the movement. Ida Husted Harper continued this project by writing Anthony's massive authorized biography (published 1898), with still more primary sources that “proved” Anthony's role as the key leader of the woman suffrage movement. As the Washington Evening Star put it, these histories made Anthony's “name … synonymous with the movement” (180). Over time, Anthony and her compatriots managed to elide the fact that she had not attended the Seneca Falls convention and had not formally joined the woman suffrage movement or met Stanton until 1851. As early as the turn of the twentieth century: most Americans believed not only that Anthony had been in attendance but also that she had even called and organized the 1848 meeting.

Tetrault's important book enables us to rethink Winston Churchill's observation: “History is written by the victors.” Instead, she convincingly proves that those who write their own histories can become the victors.