Grand Old Women: How Abolitionists and Feminists Transformed Aging in America

Grand Old Women provides a collective biography of women who redefined aging in the 19th-century United States. Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Frances Harper were central advocates for abolition and women’s rights, but advancing those causes meant that these women needed to age in public. Despite the persavie social stigma against old women and old maids, these women openly embraced oldness and, in doing so, created a new blueprint for the ways in which women could age.