Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Feminist as Thinker, co-edited by Professor Ellen Carol DuBois and Richard Cándida Smith is both an introduction to Stanton and her writings as well as an analysis of her contributions to history, women's rights and feminism. The first half of the book contains eight essays, including ones by DuBois and Smith, that provide varying viewpoints on Stanton's place in history while critically examining her thinking as well as its contradictions. The second half of the book presents a selection of Stanton's essays and public addresses. While open-minded (Stanton accepted interracial marriage) and sensitive to the mistreatment of other races, Stanton played to the then common perception that any race other than Anglo-Saxon (African, Asian, German and Irish) was inferior and therefore, not so deserving of the right to vote as white women. Stanton fought tirelessly, up until her death in 1902 at age eighty-seven, for women's right to vote; right to own property; and the right to divorce. Her writings may have cost her some recognition but not for lack of passion.

BookZone: Assuming that the women of Stanton's era had long been conditioned to accept their lot in life, did Stanton have to work hard to convince her peers of their rights or was she expressing a deep sentiment that until then had not yet been voiced?

DuBois: I think of leadership as involving both those things. I think of history-changing leadership as bringing out something that is latent in the population. I don't think of leadership as merely reflecting a common assumption. Stanton, along with other members of the pioneering women's rights generation, unearthed a discontent among American women and a latent conviction that the political principles of the nation of equal rights and individualism and democracy had something to say to them as well. Stanton did her early work in a period in the 1840s when there was a tremendous social upheaval and change and she captured a growing desire of American women to be actively involved in the making of history and of the nation and of the reform movements that were coming into being then.

BookZone: You pointed out in your essay, "The Pivot of the Marriage Relation," that Stanton fought not only for women's suffrage but also for women's right to dissolve an unhappy union. This must have been pretty radical at the time. How far did her influence reach in terms of making divorce an option?

DuBois: Well, yes, that's right. There was a consensus among women who spoke out that marriage was an unfair arrangement for women but there was no consensus that getting a divorce was the right way to go. They feared that men could abandon their marriage vows too easily, and making divorce easier to get would be bad for women. Stanton argued, I think correctly, that there was a growing desire for women to be free of binding marriage arrangements that held them down. Women were willing to take the risks of greater economic self-responsibility - a considerable risk - in order to get out of bad marriages because as Stanton said, a bad marriage weighs more heavily on a woman than it does on a man.

There were other people advocating for liberalized divorce [at that time], but they were men, most notably, Robert Dale Owen, who was the son of a great British philanthropist and socialist, Robert Owen. Robert Dale Owen worked for liberalized divorce laws from a socialist -- and I would have to say, feminist -- point of view. I think that Stanton's greatest influence was not on the liberalization of divorce laws, which went up and down during this period, but on creating recognition in society in general and among women in particular, that divorce was not always women's enemy. She began, very bravely, to make a women-centered argument for easier divorce - and I think she was right - and by the beginning of the twentieth century, it became clear that women wanted this option, perhaps even more than men.

BookZone: Although Stanton was a brilliant thinker and writer she has been criticized for her intermittent use of racial epithets. She was an abolitionist who pushed for universal suffrage and yet used racist examples in her writings to appeal to and persuade white males who held the keys to reform. At this point in time, can her use of racism as a means to an end ever be dismissed?

DuBois: Well, I certainly don't think we dismiss it in the book. I think we grapple with it pretty forthrightly. I have two ways to answer that. In the book, we argue that Stanton's racial attitudes were not unusual for her generation but come in for contemporary criticism because in other ways, she is so modern. Her racism is a more disturbing aspect because she continues to speak to the present more than so many 19th-century figures.

This is a really important and tough question as we sit here in the middle of this particular election season, which recalls the complex relationship between women's rights and black equality in the mid 19th-century, the way that they rose up together and then came into conflict. The structure of this moment, like the structure of the 1860s, really pits these two groups against each other. When the Constitution was revised to give black men the vote and not women, as we recognize in this book, was incredibly difficult, especially for the women involved; and yet, our emphasis is on understanding it in such a way that the legacy of that conflict doesn't continue to drive a wedge between black rights and women's rights.

I feel that just now we are going through some version of the same thing. I am more understanding of the anger and rage that this conflict produced in this 1860s generation of feminists. I'm not forgiving it, I'm not excusing it but I absolutely understand it. I feel there's a repeated temptation to explain women's oppression only by analogy to the oppression of people of color; a form of argument that's captured by the word, "sexism," that we invented to parallel the word, "racism." For the most part, it's been a successful rhetorical tool and yet, sexism and racism are different. They reside in different parts of the national psyche and different parts of the culture. The race/gender conflicts of the 1860s are examined in several different pieces in the book.

BookZone: Have you read anything lately that you enjoyed?

DuBois: A novel that I read most recently that I really liked was something about the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey's novel, True History of the Kelly Gang. I thought it was fabulous. I'm looking forward to reading his new book, which is about the 1960s. I also read Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie. I'm in a human rights book group where we read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel and I recommend that. I actually have out here [on the desk], the first book that we read in that group, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.

Professor Ellen Carol DuBois is currently working on project about the history of international feminism from 1920 to 1970. A co-authored portion of the project appeared in The Journal of Middle Eastern Women's Studies, published by UCLA.