Carol Faulkner

Lucretia Mott was a central figure in the interconnected struggles for racial and sexual equality in nineteenth-century America. This biography, the first in thirty years, focuses on Mott's long and controversial public career as an abolitionist, women's rights activist, and Quaker minister.

Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

Lucretia Mott's Heresy

Chester and Gil live in the same goldfish bowl. While Gil just floats around the same old place, Chester knows he can save the world. His motto, 'Life is what you make it', takes on epic dimensions in this funny story of a fishy odd couple and the power of thinking big.

Chester and Gil

Lucretia Mott

Holly Byers Ochoa

"Dedicated to reform of almost every kind - temperance, peace, equal rights, woman suffrage, nonresistance, and the abolition of slavery - Mott viewed women's rights as only one element of a broad-based reform agenda for American society.

Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott

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.

Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America

Unfaithful

Alison M. Parker

Explores gender and race as principal bases of identity and locations of power and oppression in American history.

Carol Faulkner

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