In Radical Friend, Nancy Hewitt, an accomplished scholar in women's history, has returned to her first love: the life of nineteenth-century Quaker reformer Amy Post. Hewitt, after more than three decades as a productive scholar, has now revised her 1981 dissertation and sent it forth into the world as a book.

Although Post (1802–89) was not as famous as her friends Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, William C. Nell, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Jacobs, Abby Kelley Foster, Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone, William Wells Brown, or Ernestine Rose, she welcomed them to her home, joined them on committees, traveled with them, and raised funds for their shared projects. From 1836 until her death, she was an essential foot soldier and behind-the-scenes organizer in the abolition, underground railroad, women's rights, temperance, religious liberty, free speech, spiritualism, and Progressive Friends movements. Sometimes she played a more central role. For example, she was a leader of the interracial and mixed-sex Western New York Anti-slavery Society and served as one of the many vice presidents of the American Anti-slavery Society. And it was Post who first encouraged Harriet Jacobs, who lived in her home for a time and later often visited, to publish her life story. It became the book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).

In her introduction, Hewitt stresses two themes: that Post was a “radical” (1) because she believed that society should be egalitarian, and that she was what Hewitt calls a “conductor” (5) because she spent a lifetime introducing people to each other, keeping people informed about the latest developments, and organizing local committees in response to national initiatives. Hewitt is particularly strong on the Quaker networks Post was part of, even though she eventually ended her formal membership in the (Hicksite) Society of Friends.

Post was involved in some major moments in nineteenth-century reform history. Some of the most fascinating parts of the book include fresh and detailed accounts of the 1848 Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention, which Post attended, and the Rochester Women's Rights Convention, which Post co-organized two weeks later. Hewitt also tells the fascinating stories of the origin and evolution of the little-known but historically influential Progressive Friends movement (which included many non-Quakers), the fraught history of Frederick Douglass and the anti-slavery movement in Rochester, and the sometimes controversial spiritualist movement, which Post was devoted to from the beginning.

Hewitt's great challenge was that although there are the hundreds of letters to Post in the Post Family Papers at the University of Rochester, there are fewer than sixty letters from Post, either in those papers or elsewhere, and – judging from Hewitt's book – many of them are to family. Although unable to quote Post much on reform topics, Hewitt succeeds impressively at re-creating Post's world in granular detail – her travels, her friends, and the births and deaths in her extended family. Post's husband Isaac makes periodic appearances, when Hewitt's expert research has unearthed something about him to share.

Because of Post's extensive reform network, Radical Friends is a valuable resource for historians. Helpfully, Hewitt mentions the names of every person (or so it seems) Post worked with, corresponded with, traveled with, or met. Mostly, the index guides the scholar to the right page(s). But some worthwhile names and topics have been missed. Fascinating tidbits thus become potentially inaccessible. For example, a person will need to read all the way to page 262 in order to learn that Post corresponded with spiritualist and women's rights advocate Lois Waisbrooker about the national movement to rescue women from prostitution. Neither her name nor the topic of prostitution is in the index.

Aware that the book mentions an overwhelming number of people, Hewitt provides a list at the front titled “Cast of Characters” that gives both names and sometimes some identifying information. Unfortunately, instead of listing all the names in one alphabetical list, the names are divided into ten, only semi-alphabetical, lists, organized by where the person lived and/or whether they were a coworker or a family member, a national activist (one would have to know that first) or a spiritualist/freethinker. To find a name you are unsure of, you need to check various lists, and I soon abandoned the effort.

The world of American nineteenth-century women's reform is complex and so much remains to be unearthed. Amy Post inhabited and shaped that world in its northeast corner from the 1830s to the 1880s, and thanks to Nancy Hewitt's impressive persistence, we now have this, the first biography of Post, in print.