Reprint of the original, first published in 1840.

"Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) was for a time one of America's most beloved authors, known for household manuals and children's poems, including the immortal "Over the River and Through the Wood." But in 1833, having converted to the abolitionist cause, Child published An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, the first book-length condemnation of slavery printed in the United States. Child's book created an immediate uproar and catapulted her into the life of an activist. Lydia Maria Child became one of the most consequential radicals of nineteenth-century America. In this biography of Child, Lydia Moland foregrounds Child's struggles of conscience and the meaning they held for her life-and, potentially, for ours. In her first career, Lydia Maria Child achieved what almost no woman in history had before-she was a self-sufficient female author. What, then, made her throw it all away to write An Appeal? The scandal of that book caused sales of her other books to plummet, polite society to cast her out, her beloved husband David to be jailed for libel, and the two rendered penniless. Yet Child soon drew untold numbers to the cause of abolition with her writings and her deeds. Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Charles Sumner both credit her with their conversion. During the Civil War, the Union Army distributed her words to 300,000 troops to help weary soldiers justify their sacrifice. She spirited endangered abolitionists out of the country, protected activists from angry pro-slavery mobs with her own body, and helped Harriet Jacobs edit Jacobs's autobiography, the most influential slave narrative by a woman in American history. Moland's biography restores this brave and brilliant woman to her proper place in American history while showing how her example answers these urgent questions: When confronted by sanctioned evil or systematic injustice, how should a citizen live? What prompts moral change? When do we have a duty to disobey unjust laws? Child's story is one from the past with much to teach us about our present"--

A landmark work of women's history originally published in 1967, Gerda Lerner's best-selling biography of Sarah and Angelina Grimke explores the lives and ideas of the only southern women to become antislavery agents in the North and pioneers for women's rights. This revised and expanded edition includes two new primary documents and an additional essay by Lerner. In a revised introduction Lerner reinterprets her own work nearly forty years later and gives new recognition to the major significance of Sarah Grimke's feminist writings.

A small group of black and white American women who banded together in the 1830s and 1840s to remedy the evils of slavery and racism, the "antislavery females" included many who ultimately struggled for equal rights for women as well. Organizing fundraising fairs, writing pamphlets and giftbooks, circulating petitions, even speaking before "promiscuous" audiences including men and women—the antislavery women energetically created a diverse and dynamic political culture. A lively exploration of this nineteenth-century reform movement, The Abolitionist Sisterhood includes chapters on the principal female antislavery societies, discussions of black women's political culture in the antebellum North, articles on the strategies and tactics the antislavery women devised, a pictorial essay presenting rare graphics from both sides of abolitionist debates, and a final chapter comparing the experiences of the American and British women who attended the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.

The Puritans of popular memory are dour figures, characterized by humorless toil at best and witch trials at worst. “Puritan” is an insult reserved for prudes, prigs, or oppressors. Antebellum American abolitionists, however, would be shocked to hear this. They fervently embraced the idea that Puritans were in fact pioneers of revolutionary dissent and invoked their name and ideas as part of their antislavery crusade. Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination reveals how the leaders of the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement—from landmark figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson to scores of lesser-known writers and orators—drew upon the Puritan tradition to shape their politics and personae. In a striking instance of selective memory, reimagined aspects of Puritan history proved to be potent catalysts for abolitionist minds. Black writers lauded slave rebels as new Puritan soldiers, female antislavery militias in Kansas were cast as modern Pilgrims, and a direct lineage of radical democracy was traced from these early New Englanders through the American and French Revolutions to the abolitionist movement, deemed a “Second Reformation” by some. Kenyon Gradert recovers a striking influence on abolitionism and recasts our understanding of puritanism, often seen as a strictly conservative ideology, averse to the worldly rebellion demanded by abolitionists.