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THE AGITATORS by Dorothy Wickenden

THE AGITATORS

Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights

by Dorothy Wickenden

Pub Date: March 30th, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6073-5
Publisher: Scribner

The executive editor of the New Yorker tells the stories of three female friends who defied the social conventions of their day to fight for women's rights and abolition.

Harriet Tubman, Martha Coffin Wright, and Frances A. Seward made history as females who fought against the subjection of women and slaves in the 19th century. Wickenden braids together the intersecting threads of their lives and accomplishments into a highly readable, instructive historical narrative. The daughter of Nantucket Quakers who opposed slavery and sister of early feminist Lucretia Mott, Wright came to know Seward in 1839 while residing in Auburn, New York. Although Seward lived a life of privilege, the two women bonded over many shared interests, including social reform and an “antipathy to pretentiousness.” Wright soon became involved in the abolitionist movement and made her home “a station on the underground railroad.” In 1849, Tubman escaped from her master in Maryland and made her way to Philadelphia. There, she met Mott, who actively “preached against slavery and lambasted slavers and clergymen for citing the Bible to justify their sins.” Wickenden convincingly speculates that Mott introduced Tubman to both Wright and Seward in the late 1840s. The three quickly formed friendships that united them across race and class in a common fight against White patriarchal oppression. The author sets their stories against a tumultuous backdrop of events—e.g., the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and the "bleeding" Kansas massacres of the 1850s—that not only defined the revolutionary spirit of the era, but also caused divisions that still haunt the American soul today. Yet in the strength of the bonds forged among Wright, Seward, and Tubman, Wickenden offers hope for a healing of old wounds and a future where "the dignity and equality of all Americans" is an authentic reality.

A well-researched, sharp portrait of the “protagonists in an inside-out story about the second American revolution."