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Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott. Edited by Beverly Wilson Palmer, with the assistance of Holly Byers Ochoa and Carol Faulkner. Women in American History. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, c. 2002. Pp. liv, 580. $55.00, ISBN 0-252-02674-8.)
This volume is a needed addition to the literature on nineteenth-century American women's history. Since historians and students often rely on published collections of correspondence, without such editions historical figures are more likely to be overlooked or given less attention. Once described as the "greatest American woman" by one early-twentieth-century biographer, Mott nevertheless has always played second fiddle to her peers. Considered a coadjutor in the women's rights movement, she has often been portrayed as Elizabeth Cady Stanton's spiritual inspiration at the first convention in Seneca Falls, New York, rather than as an originator or leader of the later campaign. As an antislavery activist, Mott also...