UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Martha Wright and Women's Rights

Book Jacket: "A Very Dangerous Woman" by S. H. Penney and J. D. Livingston

Sherry H. Penney
and James D. Livingston

The first biography of a pioneering women's rights activist

"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. At age twenty-six, she attended the 1833 founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society and later presided over numerous antislavery meetings, including two in 1861 that were disrupted by angry antiabolitionist mobs. Active in the Underground Railroad, she sheltered fugitive slaves and was a close friend and supporter of Harriet Tubman.

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.

Wright’s life never lacked for drama. She survived a shipwreck, spent time at a frontier fort, experienced the trauma of the deaths of a fiancé, her first husband, and three of her seven children, and navigated intense conflicts within the women’s rights and abolition movements. Throughout her tumultuous career, she drew on a reservoir of humor to promote her ideas and overcome the many challenges she faced. This accessible biography, written with the general reader in mind, does justice to her remarkable life.

"In this first book-length study of her remarkable life, Wright's strong but unpretentious personality jumps from the page in excerpts from her many letters. Her honesty and wit add zest to the now familiar stories of the antislavery and woman's rights movements, all of which is captured admirably by Penney and Livingston, a direct descendant of Wright. This very readable scholarly biography is appropriate for public and academic libraries."

Library Journal
"Is it possible that we are still discovering our Founding Mothers? Now it's Martha Wright's turn to be unearthed from history to her-story. This book shows her passion, joy and humor. If she was 'a very dangerous woman,' we could use a lot more of them."

Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe
"Beyond those specifically interested in reform, this book will attract a wider audience interested in biography and women’s lives. The ‘plot’ of Martha Coffin Wright’s life is inherently dramatic and well captured by this book."

Christopher Densmore, Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College

"This is a highly readable, very well researched book about an important woman whose life raises major questions about freedom, rights, religion, family, race, and women’s roles generally. Wright is so wonderfully witty and so quotable. . . . Who would not love to read this book?"

Judith Wellman, SUNY Oswego

	Sherry H. Penney is former chancellor and currently holder of the Sherry H. Penney Professorship of Leadership in the College of Management at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her husband, James D. Livingston, a direct descendant of Martha Wright, teaches materials science at MIT and also writes on American history.
Bachrach

Women's Studies / Biography / American History
288 pp., 16 illus.
$80.00s library cloth edition, ISBN 978-1-55849-446-6
$24.95s paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-447-3
August 2004
To order the paperback edition online, click on "ADD TO CART"
To order by mail or fax, click here for an order form

about placing orders on our secure server
ADD TO CART | VIEW CART | CHECKOUT