A Very Dangerous Woman: Marth Wright & Women's Rights by Sharon H Penney

"A very dangerous woman" is what Martha Coffin Wright's conservative neighbors considered her, because of her work in the women's rights and abolition movements. In 1848, Wright and her older sister Lucretia Mott were among the five brave women who organized the historic Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention. Wright remained a prominent figure in the women's movement until her death in 1875 at age sixty-eight, when she was president of the National Woman Suffrage Association.

In telling Wright's story, the authors make good use of her lively letters to her family, friends, and colleagues, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. These letters reveal Wright's engaging wit and offer an insider's view of nineteenth-century reform and family life. Her correspondence with slaveholding relatives in the South grew increasingly contentious with the approach of the Civil War. One nephew became a hero of the Confederacy with his exploits at the Battle of Fredericksburg, and her son in the Union artillery was seriously wounded at Gettysburg while repelling Pickett's Charge.

352 pages

University of Massachusetts Press

ISBN-978-1558494473

Revolutionary Heart by Diane Eickhoff

Clarina Nichols (1810-1885) was set apart from other 19th century women activists— both physically and emotionally. As one of the few feminists to follow the nationÂ’s westward expansion, Nichols was separated from the womenÂ’s movement just as it began to flourish under the leadership of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other Easterners. Unlike many activists, Nichols personally experienced some of the most troubling heartbreaks and hardships that a married woman of her day could know. 

The Life of Clarina Nichols and the Pioneering Crusade for Women’s Rights is an original piece of scholarship praised by academic historians, yet it is written for general readers, like the thousands of people who have heard Eickhoff perform Nichols’s speeches at chautauquas and other humanities events. Amply illustrated, with detailed notes and an appendix that includes a concise history of the early women’s movement, Revolutionary Heart is more than an engaging biography; it is a window into an unjustly overlooked period in American history about the three great 19th century reform movements—abolition, women’s rights and temperance.

277 pages

Quindaro Press

ISBN-978-0976443445