A Vote of One's Own: Madame Momentum and the Women's Network of 1868

This book presents a life unlike those of most advocates of womens rights. Caroline Severance did not focus on a cause requiring primarily militant organization. Rather she saw womens first need as new opportunities to discover interests and potentials within themselves. In proposing and co-launching the New England Womans Club Severance and her colleagues provided both a retreat from domestic pressures and a means of worldwide outreach. This club and its partner groups revived isolated minds built organizing skills for business and politics and introduced the leaders of the day to women as a constituency. The foundation of womens rights as Severance saw it was helping women to cultivate self-awareness latent individual abilities and self-knowledge. That foundation she thought represented the most direct and durable route to corporate organization and sociopolitical influence. These ordered visions to which Severance signally contributed amplified the national conversation about womens rights.