A Strong-minded Woman ─ The Life of Mary Livermore

She probably did not stand out much in the 1850s, a wife and mother living a quiet life. However, she had taught planter's children in the slave culture of the South, and she had some pretty interesting ideas going on in that head graced by a modest bonnet. When the war came she worked as a nurse and became deeply involved in the United States Sanitary Commission, which was actually a source of a variety of reforms involving the lives of women. By the 1870s Livermore gave 150 speeches a year and was the most popular female orator in America, speaking for the aforesaid Commission and for the American Woman Suffrage Association and other organizations supporting temperance and women's rights. Venet (history, Georgia State U.) writes an accessible narration of this life too long ignored. Annotation c2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Wendy Hamand Venet is associate professor of history at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She is the author of Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War and the coeditor of Midwestern Women: Work, Community, and Leadership at the Crossroads.