Carol Faulkner - Böcker

Committed abolitionist, controversial Quaker minister, tireless pacifist, fiery crusader for women's rights--Lucretia Mott was one of the great reformers in America history. Her sixty years of sermons and speeches reached untold thousands of people. Yet Mott eschewed prepared lectures in favor of an extemporaneous speaking style inspired by the inner light at the core of her Quaker faith. It was left to stenographers, journalists, Friends, and colleagues to record her words for posterity. Drawing on widely scattered archives, newspaper accounts, and other sources, Lucretia Mott Speaks unearths the essential speeches and remarks from Mott's remarkable career. The editors have chosen selections representing important themes and events in her public life. Extensive annotations provide vibrant context and show Mott's engagement with allies and opponents. The speeches illuminate her passionate belief that her many causes were all intertwined. The result is an authoritative resource, one that enriches our understanding of Mott's views, rhetorical strategies, and still-powerful influence on American society.

Committed abolitionist, controversial Quaker minister, tireless pacifist, fiery crusader for women's rights--Lucretia Mott was one of the great reformers in America history. Her sixty years of sermons and speeches reached untold thousands of people. Yet Mott eschewed prepared lectures in favor of an extemporaneous speaking style inspired by the inner light at the core of her Quaker faith. It was left to stenographers, journalists, Friends, and colleagues to record her words for posterity. Drawing on widely scattered archives, newspaper accounts, and other sources, Lucretia Mott Speaks unearths the essential speeches and remarks from Mott's remarkable career. The editors have chosen selections representing important themes and events in her public life. Extensive annotations provide vibrant context and show Mott's engagement with allies and opponents. The speeches illuminate her passionate belief that her many causes were all intertwined. The result is an authoritative resource, one that enriches our understanding of Mott's views, rhetorical strategies, and still-powerful influence on American society.

In this first critical study of female abolitionists and feminists in the freedmen's aid movement, Carol Faulkner describes these women's radical view of former slaves and the nation's responsibility to them. Moving beyond the image of the Yankee schoolmarm, Women's Radical Reconstruction demonstrates fully the complex and dynamic part played by Northern women in the design, implementation, and administration of Reconstruction policy. This absorbing account illustrates how these activists approached women's rights, the treatment of freed slaves, and the federal government's role in reorganizing Southern life.Like Radical Republicans, black and white women studied here advocated land reform, political and civil rights, and an activist federal government. They worked closely with the military, the Freedmen's Bureau, and Northern aid societies to provide food, clothes, housing, education, and employment to former slaves. These abolitionist-feminists embraced the Freedmen's Bureau, seeing it as both a shield for freedpeople and a vehicle for women's rights. But Faulkner rebuts historians who depict a community united by faith in free labor ideology, describing a movement torn by internal tensions.The author explores how gender conventions undermined women's efforts, as military personnel and many male reformers saw female reformers as encroaching on their territory, threatening their vision of a wage labor economy, and impeding the economic independence of former slaves. She notes the opportunities afforded to some middle-class black women, while also acknowledging the difficult ground they occupied between freed slaves and whites. Through compelling individual examples, she traces how female reformers found their commitment to gender solidarity across racial lines tested in the face of disagreements regarding the benefits of charity and the merits of paid employment.

Lucretia Coffin Mott was one of the most famous and controversial women in nineteenth-century America. Now overshadowed by abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mott was viewed in her time as a dominant figure in the dual struggles for racial and sexual equality. History has often depicted her as a gentle Quaker lady and a mother figure, but her outspoken challenges to authority riled ministers, journalists, politicians, urban mobs, and her fellow Quakers.In the first biography of Mott in a generation, historian Carol Faulkner reveals the motivations of this radical egalitarian from Nantucket. Mott's deep faith and ties to the Society of Friends do not fully explain her activism-her roots in post-Revolutionary New England also shaped her views on slavery, patriarchy, and the church, as well as her expansive interests in peace, temperance, prison reform, religious freedom, and Native American rights. While Mott was known as the "moving spirit" of the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, her commitment to women's rights never trumped her support for abolition or racial equality. She envisioned women's rights not as a new and separate movement but rather as an extension of the universal principles of liberty and equality. Mott was among the first white Americans to call for an immediate end to slavery. Her long-term collaboration with white and black women in the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society was remarkable by any standards. Lucretia Mott's Heresy reintroduces readers to an amazing woman whose work and ideas inspired the transformation of American society.

In her 1855 fictionalized autobiography, Mary Gove Nichols told the story of her emancipation from her first unhappy marriage, during which her husband controlled her body, her labor, and her daughter. Rather than the more familiar metaphor of prostitution, Nichols used adultery to define loveless marriages as a betrayal of the self, a consequence far more serious than the violation of a legal contract. Nichols was not alone. In Unfaithful, Carol Faulkner places this view of adultery at the center of nineteenth-century efforts to redefine marriage as a voluntary relationship in which love alone determined fidelity.After the Revolution, Americans understood adultery as a sin against God and a crime against the people. A betrayal of marriage vows, adultery was a cause for divorce in most states as well as a basis for civil suits. Faulkner depicts an array of nineteenth-century social reformers who challenged the restrictive legal institution of marriage, redefining adultery as a matter of individual choice and love. She traces the beginning of this redefinition of adultery to the evangelical ferment of the 1830s and 1840s, when perfectionists like John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, concluded that marriage obstructed the individual's relationship to God. In the 1840s and 1850s, spiritualist, feminist, and free love critics of marriage fueled a growing debate over adultery and marriage by emphasizing true love and consent. After the Civil War, activists turned the act of adultery into a form of civil disobedience, culminating in Victoria Woodhull's publicly charging the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher with marital infidelity.Unfaithful explores how nineteenth-century reformers mobilized both the metaphor and the act of adultery to redefine marriage between 1830 and 1880 and the ways in which their criticisms of the legal institution contributed to a larger transformation of marital and gender relations that continues to this day.

Women in American History To 1880 presents a collection of over 70 primary source documents that illuminate the diverse experiences of women from America's colonial period through Reconstruction. Features images, poems, newspaper articles, and letters not found in other collectionsOffers a balanced approach to women's experiences by representing a diversity of voices and focusing on themes of work, citizenship, representations, and domestic livesIncludes an introductory chapter, document headnotes, questions for further discussion after each chapter, and a bibliography for further study, designed to encourage students to engage with the text

Explores gender and race as principal bases of identity and locations of power and oppression in American history.This collection builds on decades of interdisciplinary work by historians of African American women as well as scholars of feminist and critical race theory, bridging the gap between well-developed theories of race, gender, and power and the practice of historical research. It examines how racial and gender identity is constructed from individuals' lived experiences in specific historical contexts, such as westward expansion, civil rights movements, or economic depression as well as by national and transnational debates over marriage, citizenship and sexual mores. All of these essays consider multiple aspects of identity, including sexuality, class, religion, and nationality, amongothers, but the volume emphasizes gender and race as principal bases of identity and locations of power and oppression in American history.Contributors: Deborah Gray White, Michele Mitchell, Vivian May, Carol MoseleyBraun, Rashauna Johnson, Hélène Quanquin, Kendra Taira Field, Michelle Kuhl, Meredith Clark-Wiltz. Carol Faulkner is Associate Professor and Chair of History at Syracuse University.Alison M. Parker is Professor and Chairof the History Department at SUNY College at Brockport.