The faith-based argument is not always convincing, but the author’s call for renewed feminist action, based on “the spirit...
The story of the abolitionists of the early to mid-19th century who set the stage for women’s campaign for equality and the vote.
Growing up in a wealthy family in which her father was “the dictator of the house,” Hunt (Faith and Feminism: A Holy Alliance, 2004, etc.) felt an immediate sense of kinship with 19th-century feminist abolitionists who railed against patriarchal culture. She was “captivated,” she writes, “by these women who had declared their right to shout out against slavery and claim their own authority.” The author sees these reformers as the true founders of American feminism, years before the iconic Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Hunt has two aims in her revisionist history: to celebrate women such as Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Mary Grew, Lydia Maria Child, Maria Weston Chapman, Sarah Douglass, and Catharine Beecher, who have been largely overshadowed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony; and, equally as important, to highlight the women’s religious faith. Early feminists, she writes, viewed abolition as “a sacred mission and religious vocation.” They felt “armed by God,” as they denounced church hierarchy and pro-slavery clerics. The Southern church, Hunt discovered, “gave religious cover to slavery, citing carefully chosen Bible verses and propagating the notion that the slaves were heathens.” Feminist abolitionists countered with their own reading of Scripture, emphasizing God’s love and compassion. Although they shared faith, not all feminists saw blacks as equals; agreed that black men should be enfranchised; nor considered women to be men’s equals. Defiant as they were against slavery, many women believed that only white men should wield political power, with women’s “proper sphere” relegated to the home. These differences sowed seeds of dissension among various factions of abolitionists. Regretting the absence of “Christian zeal” among contemporary feminists, Hunt urges a union between secular and faith-based feminism, inclusive of all religions.
The faith-based argument is not always convincing, but the author’s call for renewed feminist action, based on “the spirit and ethic of love,” makes for timely reading.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55861-429-1
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
