A Biographer's Quest to Uncover Intersectional Activism

A Biographer's Quest to Uncover Intersectional Activism Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz (bio) Nancy A. Hewitt, Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xvi + 424 pp. Map, images, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. Nancy Hewitt joins a growing cadre of historians of women who have turned to biography as a special tool for accessing women's past. Barbara Tuchman famously described biography as a "prism" into history, a way to explain something that might perhaps be inexplicable without turning to an individual life and experience.1 Tuchman wrote in the face of conventional wisdom that had looked upon biography as somehow "less than" the traditional historical pursuit, and even she hedged, "I do not think of myself as a biographer; biography is just a form I have used once or twice to encapsulate history."2 In spite of the lingering sense that biography remains what David Nasau termed "the profession's unloved stepchild," in recent years scholars have returned to biography, with esteemed U.S. women's historians producing works on figures ranging from Dorothea Lange to Luisa Moreno to Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Lillian Hellman.3 Notably, the Schlesinger Library hosted a seminar in summer 2007 entitled "Writing Past Lives: Biography as History," where numerous scholars of women's history (including Nancy Hewitt) presented about their biographies-in-progress. In a thought-provoking roundtable on "Historians and Biography" in the American Historical Review in 2009, Alice Kessler-Harris—then at work on her Lillian Hellman biography—affirmed its importance. "Suppose, then, that we imagined the life of an individual, not as a subject to be studied for its own sake, but as evidence that could provide a different path into the past," she wrote, arguing that an individual life in fact might help us see "into the larger cultural and social and even political processes of a moment in time."4 For historians of women, biography has proven an especially effective tool, a "different path into the past" that allows exploration of questions perhaps harder to manage in a traditional monograph. In Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds, Nancy Hewitt's compelling biography, we see the promise and potential of such biographical treatment. Only biography could allow Hewitt to explore in such detail the [End Page 581] cultural, social, and religious forces that shaped Amy Post (1802–1888). As "conductor"—the label Hewitt uses throughout Radical Friend to frame Post's reforming efforts—Post worked on coalition-building and communicating ideas among movements: abolition, women's rights, temperance, and workers' rights. Hewitt positions Post as not just a forgotten-but-important reformer but as a radical on matters of gender and race, someone who stepped outside any one individual movement for rights and saw the intersection of all claims for equality. At the end of Hewitt's introduction, she offers this framing for her biography: Those who seek models of transformative social movements would do well to look back to Amy Post and her activist worlds. In a time of deep political and social divisions, white Quakers, free and fugitive blacks, ex-evangelicals, and agrarian and émigré radicals sustained a democratic vision of social justice across the nineteenth century. From Philadelphia and Chester, Pennsylvania, to Jericho, Westbury, Farmington, and Rochester, New York; Vineland, New Jersey; Battle Creek, Michigan; Salem, Ohio; and Upper Canada, black and white women and men joined forces to promote racial justice, religious liberty, and economic democracy, as well as the rights of Indians, prisoners, workers, and women. Amy Post highlighted the connections among these issues and movements. She was a valued ally to black and white, working-class and middle-class, agrarian and urban activists (p. 14). As in recent works by Lori Ginzberg and Carol Lasser, biographical treatment enables Hewitt to thoroughly grapple with Post's inclusive-mindedness and her reformist ideology. Hewitt's work is especially important in this moment when the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment and what Martha S. Jones has termed "an impoverished vision of equality" put forward by some white woman's rights reformers, Stanton included, is prominent in both public and scholarly discussion.5 Ginzberg...

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