"To Stand Out in Heresy": Lucretia Mott, Liberty, and the Hysterical Woman
century thinker who deserves closer examination for the way her political activism was linked to the books she read.' A leading abolitionist, women's rights activist, and prominent Quaker minister, Mott forcefully lent her support to a wide range of reforms, all of which depended upon a flourishing literary public sphere. She numbered among the "ultra" reformers who published newspapers, hawked pamphlets, and sold books at antislavery fairs. These reformers constantly wrote each other about the conventions they attended, the speeches they had heard, or else they participated vicariously by reading about these events in