The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights (BookTube Prize for Nonfiction 2022 - Group G)

 The Agitators is a history of three women who lived prior to, during, and after the Civil War and were socially connected to each other through the abolition and women’s rights movements of their times. Wickenden chose to focus on Frances Seward, Martha Wright, and Harriet Tubman who all intersected in each others lives in significant ways and whose interactions and stories offer a lot of insight into the time period and the movements in which they were involved. This book takes a chronological approach to reviewing these women’s lives, with the bulk of the book focused upon the years preceding and during the Civil War in the United States. Wickenden is a journalist and editor, and you can feel her reporting back the story of these women and this time in a way that is readable, accessible, and engaging which is not a small feat with history of this style, in my opinion. I found this book immensely readable, enjoyable, and with relevant information for our current time.

    As mentioned above, the writing quality within this book is smooth if a bit dry. Wickenden’s authorial voice is strong in the sense that she can tell a compelling story in an engaging way while also not relying on particularly beautiful writing. This book reminded me of reading strong children’s biographies as a kid, where the book uses a narrative style to tell a story that in many ways doesn’t actually have a narrative in reality. This book benefits most from the engaging nature of the stories being told. There is genuine intrigue and excitement surrounding this time period, and some sections of the book — especially during the fighting of the Civil War — take the pace and style of a good action movie in the recounting. The narrative style makes these sections very enjoyable to read, but as an adult I found myself arguing a bit with the factual tone of the author. This book’s structure and thesis would have been better served by engaging the reader in a meta-narrative about finding and reviewing the letters, documents, and historical sources that Wickenden uses to tell her narrative.

    One of the critical examples of this issue in the book is the way the book is framed as the story of these three women and their lives, when at least 50% of the book is primarily focused on Frances Seward, with perhaps 30% and 20% focused on Martha Wright and Harriet Tubman respectively. For marketing purposes, this makes some sense given that Tubman is by far the best known figure being discussed in this story. My guess is that Wickenden decided to structure the book with a heavy focus on Seward for the main reason that — at the time — Seward was the most directly connected to major political figures. As we know, our history is often dictated by the records that survive certain periods of time, and Wickenden mentions near the very end of the book that Seward’s husband Henry Seward implored his children to preserve his wife’s correspondence after her death. If there is more preserved historical information about Seward, it makes sense to use Seward and her husband and family as the core of the story. In the lead-up to the war years and during the war years, Henry Seward was an abolitionist politician, Lincoln’s secretary of state, and a member of the “Team of Rivals” that Lincoln pulled together to help run the Federal government during the war. Seward herself was probably the least engaged of the three women in abolitionist and women’s rights causes, because her husband asked her to maintain a low profile during his entire political career. Because of this, the book’s point that these three women were so involved in these causes is a bit of a dud because the most staunchly involved women have the least page time. Wickenden never really engages with her sources in the text or walks the reader through her research process, and the perspective of Seward which is so prominent in the book, is never really acknowledged as anything but narrative fact. Even though the author sometimes references sources or includes pictures, there is no discussion of the research process that led to this narrative or the validity of the sources.

    I do give credit to Wickenden for complicating what is often a very uncomplicated narrative of U.S. history. On more than a few occasions, the author is clear to describe disabilities that impacted peoples lives and work. Wickenden also frequently portrays women struggling with motherhood and marriage, and she even mentions people who are acknowledged as queer in the text. Arguably my favorite person to read about in this book was Harriet Tubman, and the brief snatches of story we got about Tubman made me curious and excited to find a full biography. When I went to search for biographies of Tubman, I realized that all reports of Tubman’s life were necessarily through a third party due to the fact that Tubman could never read or write, something that Wickenden does mention in the text. Wickenden makes it clear that Tubman was known for being an exceptional storyteller and enjoyed performing tales of her experiences on the Underground Railroad and then as a war-time spy and strategist, and medical caregiver. These descriptions and stories were the most engaging parts of the book for me, but I am frustrated that Wickenden doesn’t go on to complicate how Tubman has been portrayed by other people. If primarily wealthy, white abolitionists were actually documenting Tubman’s story, how should we as students of history approach some of the elements of these documents that may speak to racist stereotypes, appealing to respectability politics of the time, or just not including information that Tubman didn’t feel comfortable sharing with a white person? Truly excellent history writing goes to the next level when it engages with the source material in an open and thoughtful way, and pulls the reader into the complicated nature of the process. This is still a very fun and compelling recounting of this time, and a book that definitely gave me the taste for more books surrounding this time period, but I did find the structure and the thesis a bit lacking, and the writing style to be a tad dry.