I Speak of Wrongs

The stunning, untold story of how three nineteenth-century trailblazers built the women’s rights movement until their irreconcilable differences over race and gender split them apart—a legacy that still plagues American feminism today—from the award-winning author of Romantic Outlaws.

I Speak of Wrongs is a sweeping, intimate history of three women who shaped—and reshaped—women’s fight for representation: Lucy Stone, the daughter of a farmer; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who came from a life of privilege; and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a free Black woman who advocated for universal civil rights. Through impeccable research and vivid storytelling, Charlotte Gordon examines how the friendship and eventual rupture between Stanton, Stone, and Harper determined the fate of suffrage, race politics, and feminist identity in the United States. 

Drawing on diaries, letters, speeches, and newly reassessed archival material, Gordon illuminates Harper’s visionary call to extend rights to women and Black people; Stone’s principled but complicated antiracist stance; and Stanton’s turn toward white supremacy, which reshaped her legacy and provides a corrective to the story we think we know about her.

As gripping as a novel, I Speak of Wrongs reframes the origin story of nineteenth-century American feminism along the racial and ideological divides that surfaced after the civil war—and may have pushed back the possibility of women’s suffrage for decades.