This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

We begin today with a story about three women, three revolutionaries who changed the world at a time

when women were not supposed to be in public life at all. The alteration of the Constitution

to perpetuate slavery, the enforcement of a law to recapture a poor suffering fugitive, giving

half of the territories of a free country to the curse of slavery,

these compromises cannot be approved by God or supported by good men.

One of the women, a committed abolitionist, was Francis Seward.

She'd settled with her husband in the small town of Auburn, New York,

and among their neighbors was a

Quaker, a mother of six named Martha Coffinwright. Although she dressed plainly and kept her house

impeccable, she didn't take her family to church on Sunday or spank her children, who were regarded

as rude and wild. Provoked by disapproval, Martha placed a copy of Mary Wollstonecraft's

vindication of the rights of woman on her parlor table, where she said it was sure to shock

guests. Francis Seward and Martha Coffin-Rite bonded over politics. Martha helped

organize the first convention for women's

rights at Seneca Falls, and both opened their homes to fugitive slaves when that was absolutely

against federal law. They were friends with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, William Lloyd Garrison,

and Frederick Douglass. But it was another neighbor of theirs in Auburn who got

closest to Martha and Francis. We have been expending our sympathies as well as congratulations

on seven newly arrived slaves that Harriet Tubman has just pioneered safely from the southern

part of Maryland. One woman carried a

...