Book Notes

From Ladies to Women: The Organized Struggle for Woman’s Rights in the Reconstruction Era
by Israel Kugler
Greenwood Press, 221 pp.

In the era of U.S. history that began with abolitionism and ended with the defeat of radical Reconstruction, a tenuous alliance developed among movements for the rights of women, African Americans, and workers. Kugler’s account of the debates in the Reconstruction-Era women’s rights movement shows how the alliance was shattered. Frederick Douglass, a strong supporter of women’s suffrage, couldn’t understand how leaders of the women’s movement could fail to give priority to fighting the terror campa...