Women in shadows were her guiding light

“I grew up around politics,” Karenna Gore Schiff writes in the opening line of “Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America.” This is, to say the least, a bit of an understatement coming from former Vice President Al Gore’s daughter -- rather like Prince Charles saying he “grew up around the monarchy” or Sean Lennon saying he “grew up around music.” The wary reader wonders just what kind of persona Schiff might be trying to develop for herself in this book.

But by the end of the first paragraph, as Schiff acknowledges the “privileged vantage point” she has had of American politics, we begin to be won over. By the end of the second, when she admits to deep disappointment over her father’s defeat in the 2000 presidential election -- and that at a time of “pervasive cynicism about politics,” she was drawn to that cynicism -- we find her positively endearing. She too has lived through dark times and emerged on the other side. She is one of us after all.

But where some might take to eating too much chocolate, watching reruns of “The Sopranos” or hiding under the covers in the face of severe disappointment, Schiff is made of sterner stuff. She began looking for an alternative to cynicism, finding the “best antidote” in stories of people who “took heart in dark days, guiding politics -- and politicians -- toward our nation’s ideals.” She was especially drawn to those who kept “politics grounded in public service,” though notably she didn’t choose elected officials. She was particularly attracted to women public servants -- intrigued by the ways in which women have used, confronted and broken through their circumscribed roles in society.

The result is Schiff’s inspirational account of the lives of nine women who have fought for social justice in American life, such as Progressive era reformer Alice Hamilton and her attempts to regulate industrial poisons; Dolores Huerta, who fought to organize farm workers; Helen Rodriguez-Trias, who campaigned for reproductive rights; and Gretchen Buchenholz, a leading advocate for children’s welfare. The nine include obvious choices -- Ida B. Wells-Barnett and her anti-lynching campaigns of the late 19th century, as well as Frances Perkins, the first female secretary of Labor -- but also lesser-known and less-acknowledged figures, such as transformative teacher Septima Poinsette Clark, who had a “pervasive and catalytic effect on the civil rights movement,” and Virginia Durr, who fought against the poll tax. She explains that she deliberately did not include such acknowledged “giants” of the 20th century as Eleanor Roosevelt and Jane Addams in an effort to “help broaden the spectrum of American heroines.”

That Schiff succeeds so well has much to do with the liveliness of writing and personal passion she brings to this well-researched work. She also weighs in frequently, explaining what she finds endearing, astonishing or moving about each woman.

To her credit, the author doesn’t gloss over these women’s faults or liabilities: She makes clear instead that each faced day-to-day struggles that often took a severe toll on their private lives and families. In fact, these struggles are what Schiff seems to find most inspiring, as she develops the underlying idea that biography itself can become a form of social action, with the power to motivate and transform.

Yet “Lighting the Way” suffers from the weakness of its genre: An account of the lives of women worthies, a formulaic literary tradition stretching back at least as far as medieval lives of female saints. Read together, their stories start to merge, despite the real diversity of these women’s experiences.

What’s more, her short chapters cannot do justice to the complexity of these women’s lives, whose faults often seem to lie merely at the level of bad behavior. We miss the psychological depth available in a full biography.

But Schiff deliberately chose to write biographical sketches that could be used to good effect by teachers and students. Her message throughout is compelling: Even ordinary citizens can make extraordinary contributions through public service.

Ultimately, Schiff has created a sort of feminist “Profiles in Courage,” written with intelligence and grace.

Alice Fahs, an associate professor of history at UC Irvine, is the author of “The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South, 1861-1865” and co-editor of “The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture.”