I Speak of Wrongs

The sweeping, untold 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 over race and gender 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.

Advance Praise

“Charlotte Gordon’s superpower is breathing life into historical women—their hopes, loves, and strategies for a better life. She excels in illuminating women’s friendships, alliances, and rivalries, and that’s what she does with her vibrant protagonists Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frances Harper. She sheds light both on these women’s inner lives and the bonds they forged with each other, as well as on their failures and missteps. Gordon’s story of the nineteenth-century women’s movement reads like a fast-paced political thriller, with women’s lives and dreams at the center of an against-the-odds race to tragedy and triumph.”

— Paul Fisher, author of The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World

“I Speak of Wrongs is a triumph. An unsparing reckoning that’s revelatory and immersive, psychologically incisive and intellectually bracing, exquisitely researched and light on its feet. By casting her empathic imagination on the vexed, messy origins of the American women’s movement, Charlotte Gordon shows exactly why what was felt, thought, said, and published in the far-ago 1800s is of urgent importance now. I could not put this book down.”

— Kate Bolick, author of the New York Times bestseller Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“Charlotte Gordon shines a floodlight on the true origin story of the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S. and its entanglement with racial reckoning and the struggle for universal rights. I Speak of Wrongs illuminates the sources of feminism’s fatal flaw—the erasure of Black women—and brings a cast of neglected heroes to the foreground of history.”

— Carolyn Cooke, author of Daughters of the Revolution and Amor & Psycho

“Brilliantly engaging, compulsively readable, and wise, this compelling, surprising story shows what might have been had nineteenth century feminists listened to Black women. Charlotte Gordon’s rigorous research meticulously reveals competing conceptions of freedom and rights which still reverberate today. Her lush, novelistic history, alive with striking characters and vivid scenes of both conflict and collaboration, is a must-read drama for our times: inspiring and cautionary.”

— Carla Kaplan, Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature, Northeastern Author of Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford and Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance