Books: Came the Revolution

THE REVOLT OF AMERICAN WOMEN (224 pp.)—Oliver Jensen—Harcourf, Brace ($6).

In the same year that Marx & Engels published their Communist Manifesto (1848), a group of women met in Seneca Falls, N.Y., pondered their discontents, and issued a manifesto of their own. "The history of mankind," it said, "is a history of repeated injuries . . . toward woman." The downtrodden of Seneca Falls resolved to turn woman's wrongs into Woman's Rights. Moreover, the same sort of female revolt was getting under way all over Christendom.

Queen Victoria called it a "mad, wicked...