An Abolitionist Abroad

Sarah Parker Remond was a remarkable woman. Her father was a hero of the American Revolution; her mother helped found one of the nation's earliest abolitionist societies in Salem, Massachusetts. Despite facing repeated challenges to her free status as a mixed-race woman in the nineteenth-century United States, Remond nevertheless achieved an international profile. She went to college in London, medical school in Florence, and attained status as a physician of obstetrics there. All the while she lectured to impressive crowds that were receptive to learning about slavery and the promise of racial equality. Her life is worthy of many biographies, yet I am of two minds about An Abolitionist Abroad. Full-length biographies of nineteenth-century black American women are rare. The chapters are divided into the familial upbringing that trained Remond to contest racism and gender inequality, her political and social activities in postabolitionist Britain, and her integration into the Italian upper middle class. The attention brought to Remond is welcome. Even so, this study lies somewhere between a scholarly monograph and a popular biography; it does not achieve either

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