ABSTRACT
Imagine the U.S. political scene in the early 1900s: World War I was being fought, and President Wilson was being criticized for promoting U.S. participation in the war to defend democracy, on the one hand, and not supporting women's suffrage at home, on the other. A women's movement, active for more than fifty years, was in the final stage of its drive to obtain the right to vote for women. Then, as now, women's rights workers were not of a single mind. Liberals, conservatives, and radicals disagreed about the best means to get what they all wanted: suffrage. It was illegal then to give even information about birth control. This was the time of Laura Ellsworth Seiler, a relatively unknown woman who, while young, worked for women's suffrage, though she never dreamed of calling herself a feminist. Gluck's oral history of Laura Ellsworth Seiler is part of a larger project that involved interviews with five average, now elderly American women about their suffragist activities. Gluck's goal was to rescue from oblivion the noninstitutional, activist side of the earlier feminist movement, the side that will not be found in official histories, published memoirs, news clippings, and other written materials. Though all five women were more or less middle class and all were either expanding or challenging women's roles at the time, their lives are incredibly diverse. Thus Laura Seller's story is not so much representative as it is exemplary.
116As Tax (1985:9-17) pointed out in her introduction to the volume in which Gluck's chapter appeared, Gluck's work is unlike pre-1960 histories of the earlier women's movement. These early histories concentrated mainly on why the movement ended. Gluck's work, in contrast, has a celebratory tone, thus reflecting the importance of history as inspirational and visionary for future generations. This story reflects "the personal is political' theme of feminist inquiry: There is no sharp distinction between Laura Seller's personal and public life. Gluck's documentation is minimally edited and without censorship. She lets the women speak for themselves, with the aid only of inserted news clippings to give the reader a better sense of the historical context.
