In 1848, in a hot brick chapel in upstate New York, a thirty-two-year-old mother of three stood up and read a document she'd written at a friend's kitchen table. She had never given a speech before. Her voice came out too quiet for the back rows to hear. What she read borrowed its opening from the Declaration of Independence and changed one phrase: all men and women are created equal.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton spent the next fifty-four years fighting for the right of American women to vote. She died in 1902. The vote came in 1920. Every single thing she did, she did without knowing whether it would work.

She was also, in 1869, capable of saying things about Black Americans and immigrants that were ugly enough to split her own movement in half for twenty-one years. She never took them back.

This is her whole life, told straight for readers aged nine to twelve ? the girl who learned Greek to replace a dead brother, the woman who wore trousers until the country wouldn't stop laughing, the eighty-year-old whose own organization voted to disown her. Along the way it asks a question most history books skip: how does anybody actually know this?

Some of what we're told about Stanton comes from Stanton, writing at eighty-two about things that happened when she was ten. This book shows you where the evidence is solid, where it's thin, and how to tell the difference.