The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights.

• Author: Meany, Paul

The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights

Dorothy Wickenden

New York: Scribner, 2021, 392 pp.

As a matter of personal preference, I tend to have a certain level of disdain for the "great man" approach to history. The flaw of viewing events solely through a testosterone-charged male gaze usually consists of reducing the world down to the cutthroat fields of absolutes--politics and war--leaving out the nuances of life in favor of a simplistic world of power. The affairs of charismatic generals and quick-witted politicians are prioritized over the experiences of all other individuals, groups, and perspectives. At its worst, this approach to history runs the risk of representing the world only through the eyes of the powerful elite, giving a skewed picture of the past that excludes most of the population of the planet from the story of how we came to be what we are today.

Crushed under a variety of despots in their lives, before the advent of the 20th century (and even during), women's voices and achievements have been consistently downplayed, marginalized, and even outright opposed by critics across the centuries. Women's near-total exclusion from educational opportunities, professional ventures, and politics means that women's contributions were easily obscured and diluted. Akin to die underground railroad of the abolitionists, the secrecy under which women had to operate to involve themselves in what was deemed "the affairs of men" obscures their contributions. In her newest book, The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and, Women's Rights, Dorothy Wiekenden attempts to draw attention to three figures involved in both the abolitionist and the women's rights movements.

The Agitators tells the story of Frances Miller Seward, Martha Coffin Wright, and Harriet Tubman, who crossed paths in Auburn, New York. While Harriet Tubman stands out in her own right as an almost mythical force of nature, Seward and Wright are more obscure figures who are usually subsumed by the larger personalities that occupied their lives. Seward, for example, was married to the secretary of state in Lincoln's government. In a run-of-the-mill history book, her husband's narrative would be prioritized. But Wickenden, from the outset, aims to vindicate that "Much of American history is made by little-known people living far from Washington." History need not always come from the top down.

Despite not being a trained historian...