Lizzie Stanton was a very controversial person in her own day, and some of her opinions would be considered radical even today. She began her public career as an abolitionist, someone who tried to abolish slavery worldwide. She insisted that women were also slaves, and Fritz notes that "when the slaves got their freedom, she figured, women would get theirs too." She tried to have the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution include women in its declaration of rights for African Americans and was bitterly disappointed when this failed to happen.

Most readers would be hesitant to compare Stanton's relatively comfortable life with the lives of America's slaves, whose living conditions were beyond appalling. A question asked in her own day was "what about black women"? What white woman lives a life nearly as bad as that of a black woman slave? Fritz does not go into...