World History

Paul Christiansen and Bruce A. McMenomy, Ph.D. for Scholars Online
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Unit 5: Industrialism and Nationalism

Chapter 21: The Age of Reform

45. Thu, Feb 20, 2014

The book is clearly making a determined effort to make up for the sins of textbooks past by emphasizing women. This is probably laudable — but the methods are downright shoddy. What comes most to my mind is a phrase I encountered in James Loewen: "relentless mentioning" — meaning perpetually throwing out names, dates, and factoids, without much context. This chapter seemingly brings up the Crimean War just so it can bring up Florence Nightingale. The section on women in the US runs through the Grimke sisters, Elizabeth Cad Stanton, and Lucretia Mott. New Zealand's bragging rights as the first country with woman's suffrage is touched on. And in Britain… well, in Britain we get both a paragraph and a footnote.

The footnote (on pg. 548) I find particularly baffling. In one way it duplicates the paragraph's last sentence, in another way it takes priority. And yet it's tucked down at the bottom of the page — which ordinarily would relegate it to lesser importance, but as it happens your eyes are almost there anyway! The only reason I can think of for the footnote is that the authors knew the information therin was out of period, if only just. But by the same token it indicates the authors know they won't be coming back to the subject later — which could be a sort of backhanded insult. "Women, you are important enough to make note of, but not enough to focus on."

That aside, however, the text is quite good at mentioning that these things happened, but does a truly abysmal job of explaining how or why they did. The section on woman suffrage in the US is seven sentences long, five of which are on the beginnings of the movement, and one on the results. The sentence in between says, "In the 1890s and early 1900s, many women [who were they?] renewed the campaign for suffrage [why did the campaign lapse in the first place? and what about Wyoming, which gave women the vote in 1869?], skillfully employing both pubic opinion and the political system [how?]." A more thorough take would mention that most of the early women's rights supporters were also abolitionists, and essentially chose to put suffrage on hold in exchange for more focus on abolition of slavery. After the Civil War ended that question, Susan B. Anthony (who went unmentioned in the text) tried to raise the suffrage issue again, but to no avail. The resurgance in the 1900s was mostly due to the efforts of Alice Paul, who took a far, far more militant approach: picketing the White House, getting arrested, hunger strikes. For a good twenty years there it was quite a battle. Quite a few women went to jail. Some women also allied themselves with socialists, who supported woman's rights as a natural extension of their egalitarian platform. After marches, parades, and causing no end of trouble, women and their allies finally forced President Wilson to endorse the 19th Amendment and fought, tooth and nail, to get it ratified across the country.

Instead of telling this story of almost ferocious determination, the book sums it all up in one line, and devotes eleven sentences to the Northwest Territory, including this gem clearly written by Captain Obvious: "These settlers knew that the territories would be admitted to the Union as states."

It's choices like this, I suspect, that leads many people to believe that history is boring.