Nancy A. Hewitt. Radical Friend

Amy Post was one of the most important women in nineteenth-century reform. Involved in almost every radical humanitarian movement of that era, Post helped to establish the abolitionist movement in western New York and launch the newspaper career of Frederick Douglass. She wrote the introduction to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Her invitation brought Douglass to the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention, where she, her husband, Isaac, and Douglass all signed the Declaration of Sentiments. Decades later she attempted to register to vote alongside Susan B. Anthony. Yet Post was not simply a woman who participated in these significant events, as Nancy A. Hewitt more than demonstrates in Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds. Post connected national to local activists within and across movements and regions throughout the North. Amy Kirby began a life of questioning boundaries from her birth into an established family of Long Island Friends. The early influences of John Woolman, Benjamin Lay, and Elias Hicks, who was her mother’s cousin, and such forms of protest as boycotting slave-made goods infused her formative years with antislavery ideology, if not formal organization. The Friends’ emphasis on spiritual equality extended to her lived experience, as her neighbors included African Americans free through birth or self-emancipation, and she attended a school that did not discriminate against race or gender. Like many early Friends woman’s rights activists, her sense of sexual egalitarianism came from observing the marriage of her parents, the leadership of women in Friends meetings, and their influence in Friends’ matters. She also tested the confines of her world by following her Inner Light beyond the consensus of her meeting, such as when she married Isaac Post, the widowed husband of her late sister, or later when she became more active in worldly affairs.

Caucus · Declaration · Egalitarianism · Gentry · Girl · Ideology · Media studies · Newspaper · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Psychology · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies