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The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights Audiobook
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An LA Times Best Book of the Year, Christopher Award Winner, and Chautauqua Prize Finalist!
“Engrossing... examines the major events of the mid 19th century through the lives of three key figures in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements.” —Smithsonian
From the executive editor of The New Yorker, a riveting, provocative, and revelatory history told through the story of three women—Harriet Tubman, Frances Seward, and Martha Wright—in the years before, during and after the Civil War.
In the 1850s, Harriet Tubman, strategically brilliant and uncannily prescient, rescued some seventy enslaved people from Maryland’s Eastern Shore and shepherded them north along the underground railroad. One of her regular stops was Auburn, New York, where she entrusted passengers to Martha Coffin Wright, a Quaker mother of seven, and Frances A. Seward, the wife of William H. Seward, who served over the years as governor, senator, and secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, Tubman worked for the Union Army in South Carolina as a nurse and spy, and took part in a spectacular river raid in which she helped to liberate 750 slaves from several rice plantations.
Wright, a “dangerous woman” in the eyes of her neighbors, worked side by side with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to organize women’s rights and anti-slavery conventions across New York State, braving hecklers and mobs when she spoke. Frances Seward, the most conventional of the three friends, hid her radicalism in public, while privately acting as a political adviser to her husband, pressing him to persuade President Lincoln to move immediately on emancipation.
The Agitators opens in the 1820s, when Tubman is enslaved and Wright and Seward are young homemakers bound by law and tradition, and ends after the war. Many of the most prominent figures of the era—Lincoln, William H. Seward, Frederick Douglass, Daniel Webster, Charles Sumner, John Brown, William Lloyd Garrison—are seen through the discerning eyes of the protagonists. So are the most explosive political debates: about the civil rights of African Americans and women, about the enlistment of Black troops, and about opposing interpretations of the Constitution.
Through richly detailed letters from the time and exhaustive research, Wickenden traces the second American revolution these women fought to bring about, the toll it took on their families, and its lasting effects on the country. Riveting and profoundly relevant to our own time, The Agitators brings a vibrant, original voice to this transformative period in our history.
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“Simms gives a witty and rousing rendition of Harriet Tubman, freedom fighter extraordinaire; Twomey is gentle and steely as Francis Seward, the publicly conventional and privately radical wife of Secretary of State William H. Seward; and Gabra Zackman is energized and clear as Martha Wright, uncompromising Quaker mother of seven…Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFile
Quotes
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“Engrossing.”
— Smithsonian -
“[An] ingeniously structured group portrait.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“Rescues Wright and Seward from obscurity and provides a new perspective on Tubman’s life and work.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review) -
“She brings a reporter’s eye for detail to this complex history… [and] invites readers to take a closer look at the path of American progress and the women who guided it.”
— BookPage -
“Wickenden pulls this history out of the dry dustiness of fact and adds color and warmth to its retelling. The women of our shared past deserve more treatments like this.”
— Booklist -
“Will resonate with readers in our own fractious era.”
— Wall Street Journal -
“Riveting…reads like accomplished literary fiction…If you’re an agitator, even a quiet one, read this book.”
— Minneapolis Star Tribune -
“An epic and intimate history.”
— New York Times Book Review
Awards
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A Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week
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A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice of the Week
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Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
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About Dorothy Wickenden
Dorothy Wickenden has been the executive editor of the New Yorker since January 1996. A Nieman Fellow at Harvard, she was the former national affairs editor at Newsweek and a longtime executive editor at the New Republic. Entering the fiction world, she is the author of Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West.
About the Narrators
Anne Twomey is an accomplished actress of both stage and screen. Her Broadway credits include Orpheus Descending with Vanessa Redgrave, To Grandmother’s House We Go, and Nuts, for which she received a Tony nomination and a Theatre World Award. Her many television appearances include guest roles on Seinfeld, Law & Order: SVU, Spin City, and the Christopher Reeves’ movie-of-the-week Rear Window. She has also appeared in the films Picture Perfect and Orpheus Descending. Her audiobook narrations have won her five AudioFile Earphones Awards.
Gabra Zackman is an actress, author, and narrator who has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards. She was educated at Northwestern University. A classically trained actress, she has appeared in theaters all over the country as well as on film and television.
Heather Alicia Simms is an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator, finalist for an Audie Award, and an actress. Her filmography includes Broken Flowers, Flutter Kick, Shock Act, Kingscounty, Head of State, Third Watch, and others. She also provided voice acting for the video game Red Dead Revolver.