Fighting Chance documents the determined efforts of leading feminists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to organize a woman's suffrage front despite limited funding, little support, and fierce opposition from all political factions. It successfully bridges the areas of women's history and nineteenth-century US political history as Faye E. Dudden explicates how these women – foiled in a suspicious, slippery, and turbulent political landscape – saw a fighting chance for their cause. The central thread of Fighting Chance critically trails the intermittent relationship between black rights and women's rights, reflected chiefly through the movements’ leading proponents, such as Anthony, Stanton, Wendell Phillips, Lucy Stone, and Frederick Douglass. The abolitionist movement was organized and subsidized, whereas black rights and women's rights were merely auxiliary “junior partners” (13). Following abolition, discussion reopened on voting rights and citizenship, as legislators toyed (briefly) with the idea of universal suffrage. In this powerful account, Dudden extracts and reinterprets escalating internal tensions and personal jealousies that grew from the legacy of this unique and diverse coalition. Ultimately, Dudden expounds Anthony and Stanton's shift from idealism, as allies of the American Anti-Slavery Society and, later, leaders of the American Equal Rights Association, to bitter rivals flirting with the enemy through their barefaced, warmongering racism in their newspaper, the Revolution, and in their opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment.

Rejecting the position of sceptics that subordinate Stanton's egalitarianism to habitual racism, Dudden contends that these feminists were at first very committed to universal rights and “battled to change others’ minds” (195). What appears to be a clear exoneration of Anthony and Stanton's later racist and oppositional strategies is a courageous stab at rationalizing these feminists’ disappointing moral decline that so often dominates our memory. Money and political desperation are crucial factors in the book. At the close of the Civil War, Dudden expresses the betrayal that Anthony and Stanton felt at having been denied their share of the Hovey Fund, now controlled by Wendell Phillips. Charles Hovey's will stipulated that “in case chattel slavery should be abolished in the United States” before the money was exhausted, the rest should go towards women's rights, among other causes (68). As the new AASS leader, Phillips extended the definition of abolition to black (male) suffrage. “We cannot agree that the enfranchisement of women and the enfranchisement of the blacks stand on the same ground, or are entitled to equal effort at this moment” (71). Phillips's “Negro Hour” became the top priority of the AASS, and he also requested that Stanton and Anthony suspend (white) woman's suffrage until the next generation and redirect their efforts towards black (male) suffrage.

What Dudden unpacks so profoundly – often taken for granted in contemporary scholarship – is the extent to which the notion of (white) woman's suffrage was perceived so ridiculously by white men and white women. Most middle-class white women chose the preferred option of wielding political influence from within the home. Thus, in defence of Anthony and Stanton's heritage in universal principles, Dudden maintains that these feminists canvassed under the conviction that suffrage was a basic human right, not a privilege. However, this lack of backing reveals Anthony and Stanton's shift between “educated suffrage” and bellwether strategies, and the political lessons to be learned from failed opportunities in Kansas, New York, and Washington, DC. As Dudden illuminates these women's gradual isolation (financial and representational) from the AASS and the AERA, and the political desperation that they faced as exploits of Democratic and Republican political pitting, the likelihood of accepting any endorsement, even if from extremely conservative Democrats, appears all the more probable.

Dudden triumphantly paints a vivid picture of two determined women with a vision way ahead of their time. Yet at all levels Anthony and Stanton are measured as human beings: intensely emotional, susceptible to the deepest of prejudices, and equally ready to exploit these prejudices for the sake of their own sense of a fighting chance. Transpiring the facts of the events leading up to the final schism between black (male) suffrage and (white) woman's suffrage over the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869, Dudden makes evident how Anthony and Stanton became embittered by what they felt was the AASS's abandonment of the abolitionist open-platform tradition. On the contrary, outside brief appearances by Frances Harper and Sojourner Truth, Dudden elides the voices of black women. Some analysis of how black women figured into Anthony and Stanton's gendered politics, particularly regarding the working woman, would have procured a more extensive and complex picture of these feminists’ moral decline.