Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America

With this book, Nancy Isenberg illuminates the origins of the women’s rights movement. Rather than herald the singular achievements of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, she examines the confluence of events and ideas — before and after 1848 — that, in her view, marked the real birth of feminism. Drawing on a wide range of sources, she demonstrates that women’s rights activists of the antebellum er...