Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform and the State offers a fascinating new perspective on the relationship between Abolition and women's rights in the nineteenth century. Alison Parker takes the lives and work of six women in order to illustrate the frequently overlooked or understated role that they played in the public political sphere. Her subjects are Fanny Wright, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Frances Watkins Harper, Frances Willard and Mary Church Terrell. They are well chosen for a number of reasons. First, they come from both sides of the Atlantic and show the importance of transatlantic traffic to the reforming mission. Second, they include white and black activists and illustrate the different constraints, interests and advantages that racial background gave to a common cause. Third, they comprise women of startlingly different personalities and temperaments and illuminate the importance of individuals and individuality to the direction and tone of political action. Fourth, Parker seizes on subjects who have not really been acknowledged and valued for their political talents. In this respect she undoes the common prejudice that women had little or no public platform in the nineteenth century and were forced to have impact from within the domestic sphere. Although the persistence of moral suasion as a form of indirect political action bears out the truth of this prejudice to some degree, Parker also shows that there were women, such as Fanny Wright, who had no qualms about taking a more direct public role. She also shows the ridicule and condemnation to which Wright was subject as a result, illustrating that while it was possible for women to impose themselves and their views in the public domain, it was also a risky and personally compromising business that required an exceptionally tough skin.

Parker skilfully combines an understanding of the personal and biographical considerations of each woman with an understanding of their place in the transatlantic and cross-racial fight for greater political, legal, economic and social freedoms for African Americans and for women. She shows how natural it was for the two causes to become entwined as Abolitionism frequently involved an appeal from white women to consider the role of their sisters in slavery, and white women who became involved in Abolitionism were often motivated by an empathic connection with their own status as disenfranchised, economically and socially constrained citizens. She also illustrates the complexity of the terrain with African American women such as Mary Terrell and Frances Watkins Harper feeling the double bind of their sex and race but also gaining political traction from the authenticity that their skin colour gave to stories of abuse and oppression. In this respect race emerges as both an extra chain in the heavy manacles of political and social oppression and a source of political power for those who spoke out against it.

One of the most interesting strains of the argument elucidates the effect of campaigns for greater legal and state rights for women on the narrative of nineteenth-century womanhood. To counter the critics, Parker argues, the Grimké sisters and Frances Willard formulated definitions of womanhood and women's fitting domain that facilitated their political activism because it made place for women in the political sphere that did not threaten their role as mothers in the home. To a large extent their co-equality arguments not only accepted, but depended on, the physical differences of sex. Women were persuaded that it was their moral duty to participate in the improvement of society at large and feminist maternalists refused to accept a choice between political action and motherhood. So, Parker concludes, these women “were producers of ideas as well as social movements” (214).

In showing how nineteenth-century women impacted on state legislation, Parker has produced an important piece of feminist history. Articulating Rights demonstrates the need to think across boundaries of nation, race and gender while recognizing their distinctive importance in shaping the nature of political commitment. Parker's subjects illustrate the wider relevance of women to the nineteenth-century public sphere. But her portraits never revert to type. We never get the sense that these women are simply representative. The idiosyncratic and individual nature of character plays a fundamental role in political argument as they come to life on the page. This is an enjoyable and informative read.