Historiography is the study of the context in which history is formulated or written. It helps us to understand why historical facts can be interpreted differently over time. By examining books from different eras on a specific topic, historians can note trends in opinion, arguments, perspectives, and sources. Lisa Tetrault, the author of The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898, is an associate professor specializing in the history of gender, race, and American democracy. The central thesis of her book is to unpack and analyze the popular history, or myth, of the women’s suffrage movement. Tetrault argues that suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and others created and popularized the Seneca Falls origin story “to focus the movement on…show more content… Anthony, and the American Woman Suffrage Association, founded by Lucy Stone and Henry B. Blackwell. In her review, historian Bonnie Anderson explains that Stanton and Anthony purposefully excluded rival groups in their written history of the movement, the three-volume History of Woman Suffrage. It is within this biased account of history that the myth is depicted. By touting this book as the “official record of the movement” while also ignoring the origins of the movement before the Seneca Falls Convention as well as influential feminist abolitionists, Stanton and Anthony created a new version of history. Another example of this mythologizing of the women’s movement provided by Anderson is Tetrault’s depiction of the growing conservatism in the re-unified movement. This re-unification refers to the unification of the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association into one organization: the National American Woman Suffrage
