Acquaintances, Old and New, Among Reformers

[Milwaukee]: [S.E. Tate Printing Company], 1911. First edition. Fine. Original publisher's cloth binding, with title and author embossed in bright gilt to front board. In very nearly Fine condition, with trivial spotting to the rear board and a hint of offsetting to the hinges from publisher's glue. An exceptionally tight, square copy that is internally unmarked and fresh.

"In 1878, the Reverend Olympia Brown arrived in Racine, Wisconsin, where she took charge of a small Universalist group...Her arrival should have received more recognition than it did, for Mrs. Brown personified the kind of emancipated woman the country was to see in the years ahead. At forty-three she was in the prime of a life devoted to women's freedom, eager to turn her fellow men to righteousness and to reveal to them the grave inequalities in the American social and political system" (Neu). She already had a strong reputation in the East as an ardent abolitionist who named John Brown among her heroes, as well as a suffragist committed to the enfranchisement of women of all races who eventually left Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's National American Woman Suffrage Association due to its embrace of white supremacist language and policies.

By the time she wrote the present book, Brown was ready to document a lifetime of intersectional activism that began with the influence of her mother, carried her through a degree at the integrated Antioch College, and resulted in her leadership in the American Equal Rights Association, which pursued equality for Black and Indigenous as well as white women. With a firm belief that the fight for women's suffrage opened the door to a wider range of racial, economic, and social reform, Brown campaigned in the AERA alongside Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone, and Alice Paul, Brown; and she dedicated her book "To the Woman Suffrage cause, which has inspired the noblest reformers of the last half-century." Fine.