Penn Press Log

This Week's New Books--Locked In, Locked Out, Take Up Your Pen, and More

Locked In, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores 232 pages | 6 x 9 | 19 illus. Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4513-4 | $65.00 | £42.50 A volume in the City in the Twenty-First Century series In Locked In, Locked Out, Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores examines four communities in Ponce, Puerto Rico, showing how gates—in both physical and symbolic ways—distribute power, reroute movement, sustain social inequalities, and cement boundary lines of class and race. Read more . . .

Take Up Your Pen: Unilateral Presidential Directives in American Politics Graham G. Dodds 304 pages | 6 x 9 | 1 illus. Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4511-0 | $69.95 | £45.50 A volume in the Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism series Graham G. Dodds explores the constitutional and historical development of unilateral presidential directives—the ability of presidents to bypass the legislative process and set public policy via their own executive orders—and how such a practice fits Americans' conception of democracy. Read more . . .

Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria Fabian Klose. Translated by Dona Geyer 448 pages | 6 x 9 Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4495-3 | $89.95 | £58.50 A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series Based on previously inaccessible material from international archives, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence examines the relationship between emerging human rights concepts after 1945 and repressive British and French actions against anticolonial movements in Africa. Read more . . .

Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature Jeffrey Todd Knight 288 pages | 6 x 9 | 33 illus. Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4507-3 | $59.95 | £39.00 A volume in the Material Texts series Jeffrey Todd Knight excavates the culture of book collecting and compiling in early modern England, examining how the pervasive practice of mixing texts, authors, and genres into single bindings defined Renaissance ways of thinking and writing. Read more . . .

Multilevel Citizenship Edited by Willem Maas 288 pages | 6 x 9 Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4515-8 | $65.00 | £42.50 A volume in the Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism series Multilevel Citizenship challenges the dominant conception of citizenship as legal and political equality within a sovereign state, demonstrates how citizenship is constructed by political and legal practices, and explores alternative forms of membership in substate, suprastate, and nonstate political communities. Read more . . .

Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places Edited by Joanne McEvoy and Brendan O'Leary 432 pages | 6 x 9 | 25 illus. Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4501-1 | $85.00 | £55.50 A volume in the National and Ethnic Conflict in the 21st Century series This volume considers an array of power-sharing systems in divided cities and states, with critical evaluations of their merits and defects as well as explanations of their emergence, maintenance, and failings. Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson. Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

This Week's New Books--Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America, Plus Three Paperback Releases

Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America Daniel K. Richter 384 pages | 6 x 9 | 35 illus. Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4500-4 | $45.00 | £29.50 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0830-6 | $45.00s | £29.50 In this sweeping collection of essays, one of America's leading colonial historians reexamines struggles between Native peoples and Europeans in early America in terms of how each understood the material basis of power. Read more . . .

Now in Paperback Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road Johan Elverskog 352 pages | 6 x 9 | 48 illus. Cloth 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4237-9 | $69.95 | £45.50 Paper 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2259-3 | $29.95 | £19.50 EBook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0531-2 | $29.95 | £19.50 A volume in the Encounters with Asia series This groundbreaking work challenges contemporary stereotypes by revealing how both Buddhist and Muslim religious traditions were shaped by a millennium of cross-cultural exchange along the Silk Road from Iran to China. Read more . . .

Now in Paperback Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic Edited by Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster 344 pages | 6 x 9 | 6 illus. Cloth 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4289-8 | $59.95 | £39.00 Paper 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2260-9 | $27.50 | £18.00 Focusing on the formative period of European exploration, settlement, and conquest in the Americas, from roughly 1500 to 1760, Empires of God brings together literary scholars and historians of the English, French, and Spanish Americas to demonstrate the power of religious ideas and narratives to create kingdoms both imagined and real. Read more . . .

Now in Paperback Along an African Border: Angolan Refugees and Their Divination Baskets Sónia Silva 188 pages | 6 x 9 | 37 illus. Cloth 2011 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4293-5 | $39.95 | £26.00 Paper Apr 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2268-5 | $24.95 | £16.50 A volume in the Contemporary Ethnography series Anthropologist Sónia Silva examines how a community of Luvale people, Angolan refugees living in Zambia, use lipele divination baskets to cope with daily life in a new land and maintain connections to their past. Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson. Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

This Week's New Books: Agriculture, Love, and Archaeology

Food and Agriculture in Ethiopia: Progress and Policy Challenges Edited by Paul Dorosh and Shahidur Rashid 376 pages | 6 x 9 | 104 illus. Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4529-5 | $59.95 | £39.00 A volume in the International Food Policy Research Institute series In this volume, policy experts provide empirical evidence to shed light on the complexities of agricultural and food policy in today's Ethiopia, highlight major policies and interventions of the past decade, and provide insights into building resilience to natural disasters and food crises.

Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity Carmen Nocentelli 272 pages | 6 x 9 | 10 illus. Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4483-0 | $55.00 | £36.00 Drawing on a wide range of Dutch, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish sources, Empires of Love shows how the encounter with Asia shaped the way early modern Europeans came to define their racial and sexual identities. al ventures have formed political associations to promote and defend their interests.

The Archaeology of Phrygian Gordion, Royal City of Midas: Gordion Special Studies 7 Edited by C. Brian Rose 360 pages | 8 1/2 x 11 | 13 color, 230 b/w illus. Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-1-934536-48-3 | $79.95 | £52.00 A volume in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology series This volume covers all aspects of Gordion's Phrygian settlement topography from the arrival of the Phrygians in the tenth century B.C. through the arrival of Alexander the Great in 333 B.C., focusing on the site's changing topography and the consistently fluctuating interaction between the inhabitants and the landscape.

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson. Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Beyond "Half the Sky"

Even if you take issue with the celebrity cameos and reporting style in the recent smash PBS documentary, Half the Sky, you can't deny that the program increased the awareness of discrimination against women, one of today's paramount moral challenges. For a deeper understanding of women's human rights, here are some additional resources to help navigate these complex problems:

Women's Human Rights: The International and Comparative Law Casebook by Susan Deller Ross

Women's Human Rights is the first human rights casebook to focus specifically on women's human rights. Rich with interdisciplinary material, the book advances the study of the deprivation and violence women suffer due to discriminatory laws, religions, and customs that deny them their most fundamental freedoms. It also provides present and future lawyers the legal tools for change, demonstrating how human rights treaties can be used to obtain new laws and court decisions that protect women against discrimination with respect to employment, land ownership, inheritance, subordination in marriage, domestic violence, female genital mutilation, polygamy, child marriage, and the denial of reproductive rights.

Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights, edited by Dorothy Hodgson

An interdisciplinary collection, Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights examines the potential and limitations of the "women's rights as human rights" framework as a strategy for seeking gender justice. Drawing on detailed case studies from the United States, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere, contributors to the volume explore the specific social histories, political struggles, cultural assumptions, and gender ideologies that have produced certain rights or reframed long-standing debates in the language of rights. The essays address the gender-specific ways in which rights-based protocols have been analyzed, deployed, and legislated in the past and the present, and the implications for women and men, adults and children in various social and geographical locations. Questions addressed include: What are the gendered assumptions and effects of the dominance of rights-based discourses for claims to social justice? What kinds of opportunities and limitations does such a "culture of rights" provide to seekers of justice, whether individuals or collectives, and how are these gendered? How and why do female bodies often become the site of contention in contexts pitting cultural against juridical perspectives?

Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspective by Rebecca Cook

Rebecca J. Cook and the contributors of Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspective analyze how international human rights law applies specifically to women in various cultures worldwide, and develop strategies to promote equitable application of human rights law at the international, regional, and domestic levels. Their essays present a compelling mixture of reports and case studies from various regions in the world, combined with scholarly assessments of international law as these rights specifically apply to women.

Gender Stereotyping: Transnational Legal Perspectives byRebecca J. Cook and Simone Cusack

Drawing on domestic and international law, as well as on judgments given by courts and human rights treaty bodies, Gender Stereotyping offers perspectives on how wrongful gender stereotypes can be effectively eliminated through the transnational legal process in order to ensure women's equality and exercise of their human rights.

On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea by Sealing Cheng 

Are women who travel to work in such clubs victims of trafficking, sex slaves, or simply migrant women? How do these women understand their own experiences? Is antitrafficking activism helpful in protecting them? In On the Move for Love, Sealing Cheng attempts to answer these questions by following the lives of migrant Filipina entertainers working in various gijichon clubs. Focusing on their aspirations for love and a better future, Cheng's ethnography illuminates the complex relationships these women form with their employers, customer-boyfriends, and families. She offers an insightful critique of antitrafficking discourses, pointing to the inadequacy of recognizing women only as victims and ignoring their agency and aspirations. Cheng analyzes the women's experience in South Korea in relation to their subsequent journeys to other countries, providing a diachronic look at the way migrant issues of work, sex, and love fit within the larger context of transnationalism, identity, and global hierarchies of inequality.

Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives, edited by Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf

Female Circumcision brings together African activists to examine the issue within its various cultural and historical contexts, the debates on circumcision regarding African refugee and immigrant populations in the U.S. and the human rights efforts to eradicate the practice. This volume does not focus narrowly on female circumcision as a set of ritualized surgeries sanctioned by society. Instead, the contributors explore a chain of connecting issues and processes through which the practice is being transformed in local and transnational contexts. The authors document shifts in local views to highlight processes of change and chronicle the efforts of diverse communities as agents in the process of cultural and social transformation.

A Voice for Human Rights by Mary Robinson, edited by Kevin Boyle

Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, was one of the policy leaders interviewed for Half The Sky. A Voice for Human Rights offers an edited collection of Robinson's public addresses, given between 1997 and 2002, when she served as United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights. The book also provides the first in-depth account of the work of the Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights. With a foreword by Kofi Annan and an afterword by Louise Arbour, the book will be of interest to all concerned with international human rights, international relations, development, and politics.

This Week's New Books: Matching Organs with Donors, Divine Art, Infernal Machine, Not in This Family, Sweet Liberty

Matching Organs with Donors: Legality and Kinship in Transplants Marie-Andrée Jacob 248 pages | 6 x 9 Cloth | ISBN 978-0-8122-4432-8 | $65.00 | £42.50 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0650-0 | $65.00 | £42.50 A volume in the Contemporary Ethnography series This sensitive ethnography reveals the methods and mindsets of doctors, patients, donors, and sellers in Israel's living kidney transplant bureaus. Matching Organs with Donors describes how these actors identify and adjudicate suitable matches between donor and recipient using terms borrowed from definitions of kinship.

Now in Paperback Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending Elizabeth L. Eisenstein 384 pages | 6 x 9 | 24 illus. Cloth  | ISBN 978-0-8122-4280-5 | $45.00 | £29.50 Paper | ISBN 978-0-8122-2216-6 | $26.50 | £17.50 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0467-4 | $26.50 | £17.50 A volume in the Material Texts series The author of the hugely influential The Printing Press as an Agent of Change offers a magisterial and highly readable account of five centuries of ambivalent attitudes toward printing and printers. Once again, she makes a compelling case for the ways in which technological developments and cultural shifts are intimately related.

Now in Paperback Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America Heather Murray 312 pages | 6 x 9 | 25 illus. Cloth 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4268-3 | $45.00 | £29.50 Paper 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2224-1 | $24.95 | £16.50 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0740-8 | $24.95 | £16.50 A volume in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series Not in This Family shows how gays and their heterosexual parents both have animated each other's sensibilities, consciousness, and even culture and politics. Author Heather Murray suggests a reciprocal family life and complicates the notion of gay banishment.

Now in Paperback Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss 312 pages | 6 x 9 | 7 illus. Cloth 2009 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4172-3 | $39.95 | £26.00 Paper 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2227-2 | $24.95 | £16.50 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0356-1 | $24.95 | £16.50 A volume in the Early American Studies series Sweet Liberty offers a history of Martinique and its relationship to metropolitan France during the final years of slavery in the French empire. It argues that an Atlantic-world approach reveals how race, slavery, class, and gender shaped what it meant to be French on both sides of the ocean.

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson. Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Five Facts from China and Africa: A Century of Engagement

China and Africa: A Century of Engagement, the new book by David H. Shinn and Joshua Eisenman, is as comprehensive as its title suggests. This book, the first of its kind to be published since the 1970s, examines all facets of China's relationship with each of the fifty-four African nations. Selecting just five facts from this detailed study was a bit of a challenge, but nowhere near as labor-intensive as Shinn and Eisenman's research.

1. Chinese scholar Gao Jinyuan noted that Queen Cleopatra of Egypt reportedly wore silks that likely came from China. Around 166 CE, the Roman emperor sent northeast African goods as gifts to the Han emperor.

2. Between 1417 and 1419, Zheng He, a naval explorer in the court of Ming Dynasty Emporer Yongle with a fleet comparable in size to the Spanish Armada, made a voyage to the Somali coast. There is evidence that he reached Malindi on the Kenyan coast and Mombassa, and Mafia Island off Tanazina. (West African gold and slaves first arrived in Portugal in 1441.)

3. Zhou Enlai began his historic ten-country visit to Africa in 1963, signalling the begining of high level face-to-face contact betten African leaders and representatives from the People's Republic of China. While on tour, Zhou Enlai revealed the PRC's five principles for relations with African and Arab countries. These principles have served as official line of Chinese-African relations since then:

• China supports the African and Arab peoples in their struggle to oppose imperialism and old and new colonialism and to win and safeguard national independence
• It supports the pursuance of the policy of peace, neutrality and nonalighmsne by the governments of African and Arab countries
• It supports the desire of the African and Arab peoples to achieve unity and solidarity in the manner of their own choice
• It supports the African and Arab states in their efforts to settle their disputes through peaceful consultation
• It holds that the sovereignty of the African and Arab countries should be respected by all other countries and that encroachment and interference from any quarter should be opposed.

4. In 2010, Nigeria imported $7.4 billion in goods from China while china's imports from Nigeria reached only $1.1 billion. Nigeria's trade deficit with China is creating tension between the nations. The United States remains Nigeria's largest trading partner.

5. From 1988 to 2010, the percentage of Africa's total trade with China rose from 0.7 percent to 13.31 percent. China's total trade with Africa grew from 1 percent to 4.3 percent.

Did Peer Review Blind Scholars to the Coming of the Arab Spring?

Penn Press public policy and international relations editor Bill Finan comments on the scope of peer review in light of current events in the Middle East.

Questioning the Limits of Peer Review in the Social Sciences

Peer review is a defining element of what it means to be a university press. The process of subjecting a book manuscript to outside evaluation by experts in the field is central to the integrity and purpose of the university press. For a trade press, the first question is Will it sell? For a university press, Is it a significant contribution to the scholarship? There are pitfalls in the peer review process, however, especially in the social sciences. The eruption of the Arab Spring and the upsetting of an entire field of study in political science is a case in point.

Peer reviewers serve two purposes: they provide quality control and also guidance on how to think about the content of the book manuscript the editor has acquired. The first ensures that facts, methodologies, and relevant citations to the discipline’s literature are, respectively, accurate, sound, and encompassing.

The second role—how to think about the content—is especially important both to the acquiring editor and the press: acquiring editors generally are not able to judge each manuscript in the same way an expert in the field can, since the expert is conversant with the most recent research and also has a specialist’s knowledge of the material that an editor, who is generally responsible for more than one area, or list, does not. The editor and the press rely on the peer reviewers much like a physician relies on a battery of tests to determine what illness a patient might be suffering from or as a scientist draws on the results of tests to determine the validity of a hypothesis.

This, of course, is how peer review should ideally work. But what happens when the body of work on which the peer reviewers have contributed to and rely on to measure and evaluate the judgments and work of others turns out to be wrong? That question is especially pertinent at this moment in the field of Middle Eastern studies.

The Arab Spring, the shorthand appellation that has come to be used to describe the revolts that have spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa the past 15 months, is the event that prompts this question (see http://anarabcitizen.blogspot.com/2012/01/origin-of-term-arab-spring.html for a concise historical genealogy of the term). The Arab Spring began in Tunisia in late 2010 with the self-immolation of a fruit and vegetable vendor. This sparked a popular uprising that saw the removal of the country’s long-time authoritarian leader. It then spread rapidly through the rest of North Africa and the Middle East, leading to the removal of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. And it continues today, as Syria’s Bashar Assad bloodily attempts to crush attempts to remove him from office.

The revolts in the region have caught nearly an entire field of study by surprise. A similar cascade of events between 1989 and 1992 in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union caught another field of study—Sovietology—and left it surprised and bewildered. Even today what have become Russian studies specialists continue to debate just what exactly happened. Middle Eastern studies is now in the process of trying to understand just what has happened; one respected and long-time specialist said to me last year that “we all got it wrong” in terms of the scholarship on the Middle East.

What did they get wrong? The conventional wisdom—one of the baselines of scholarship used to evaluate the work of any specialist on the region by their peers—held that the leaders in the Middle East and North Africa would remain in power for the near term. Although the scholarship was aware of currents of discontent among the citizenry in the region, the prevailing view held that the political leadership would remain securely in place because of a “robust authoritarianism.”

One Middle Eastern studies scholar, F. Gregory Gause at the University of Vermont, has written directly on how the community got it wrong. His essay in Foreign Affairs last summer, “Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring,” was an honest attempt to explore how the field—including him—missed the signs of authoritarian instability in the Middle East and North Africa. As Gause wrote:

The vast majority of academic specialists on the Arab world were as surprised as everyone else by the upheavals that toppled two Arab leaders last winter and that now threaten several others. It was clear that Arab regimes were deeply unpopular and faced serious demographic, economic, and political problems. Yet many academics focused on explaining what they saw as the most interesting and anomalous aspect of Arab politics: the persistence of undemocratic rulers.

The field missed the revolution because it was focused on understanding why revolution would not occur. The tactics and strategies authoritarian rulers put into place to ensure that they would remain in power were the main variables on which the field generally placed emphasis and tried to explain. Now the debate begins, as it has with Gause, on where the specialists went wrong.

Did peer review fail? There is no simple yes or no answer. The political scientist Eva Bellin has written an important and considered paper on what was missed but also what needs to be saved in the earlier scholarship in “Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Lessons form the Arab Spring,” (Comparative Politics, January 2012). She notes that we cannot just dismiss the body of work that developed on why authoritarians remained in power so long since the work was not intended to predict the revolts that have occurred.

That is true. But we are still left with the quandary John Maynard Keynes lamented on the limits of theory, whether political or economic, when it comes to stasis and crisis: "Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again." We need only change “economists” to “political scientists” to appreciate that scholarship, especially when attempting to define current history, has its limits—as does peer review.

China and Africa--Now Available

China and Africa: A Century of Engagement
David H. Shinn and Joshua Eisenman
544 pages | 6 x 9 | 14 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4419-9 | $69.95 | £45.50

The recent growth in relations between China and the nations of Africa is one of the most important geopolitical phenomena of our time. China and Africa presents a unique, comprehensive view of this relationship. This monumental study, the first since the 1970s, examines China's ties with all of Africa's 54 countries. Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Beyond the Resource Curse--Now Available

Beyond the Resource Curse
Edited by Brenda Shaffer and Taleh Ziyadov
512 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4400-7 | $69.95 | £45.50

"Beyond the Resource Curse foursquarely addresses the question of what resources can do--or not do--for a country. The novelty of the data--the contributors treat a broad array of cases that are seldom thought about--along with the freshness of the analysis and the eclectic mix of topics and countries discussed, makes this a truly refreshing volume."--Svante Cornell, Johns Hopkins University

Beyond the Resource Curse focuses on the paradoxical relationship between natural wealth and economic security and examines the particular pitfalls and consistent problems facing oil and gas exporting states and contributes to a better comprehension of the perils of oil and gas export. Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Remembering Lucretia Mott on International Women's Day

Lucretia Coffin Mott’s record of leadership in the women’s movement and in transatlantic abolitionism make her an ideal figure to remember on International Women’s day, even though Mott has long been overlooked.

In the portrait on the cover of Lucretia Mott's Heresy by Carol Faulkner, the modestly dressed elder looks nothing like a heretic. Yet this uncompromising nineteenth-century activist would make many twenty-first century American radicals seem tame. One of the most famous women of her time, Lucretia Coffin Mott addressed issues of feminism, consumer activism, and interracial cooperation long before those terms entered political debates. Faulkner calls Mott “the foremost white female abolitionist in the United States” and places her at the vanguard of the antislavery movement.

"I am a worshipper after the way called heresy--a believer after the manner which many deem infidel," said Mott to an audience of medical students from Thomas Jefferson Medical College and the University of Pennsylvania. The all white, all male, and partially southern group had gathered in 1849 to hear a fifty-six-year old woman's views on the evils of plantation slavery. Mott prayed that the audience "receive that which conflicts with their education, their prejudices, and their preconceived notions."

Mott’s “demure appearance as a Quaker matron enabled her to preach her radical message of individual liberty and racial equality to a wide variety of audiences, including those hostile to her views,” writes Faulkner. Unfortunately, the gentle appearance may have also caused her to recede into history. Too many people have confused Mott’s faith and active interest in family life with political passivity. Early biographies emphasized her domestic, motherly side. Never-the-less, the pacifist was a fighter in one sense. Faulkner writes:

She told an audience of abolitionists that, “the early Friends were agitators; disturbers of the peace.” She advised them to be equally “obnoxious.” Lucretia followed her own council. She used her powerful feminine voice and her physical body to confront slavery and racial prejudice as well as sexual inequality, religious intolerance, and war.”

With the exception of slavery, the issues that inspired Mott’s activism remain among the most controversial in American politics. Looking back at her public life, it is tempting to wonder how she would like to be remembered. It’s easy to imagine contemporary leaders and pundits calling Mott “obnoxious,” to say the least, in spite of her grandmotherly looks. She would probably want it that way.