Hélène Quanquin is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Lille (France). She studies 19th-century reform movements and activists. She is primarily interested in the mutual influence between the personal and the political and the different sites where political work is done and ideas are produced. She has published essays in European and American journals and books. She has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Schlesinger Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the Sophia Smith Collection and the Association Française d’Etudes Américaines.

• Introduction; Chapter One: William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips: The "Man Question"; Chapter Two: Frederick Douglass and James Mott: Women’s Rights Partners; Chapter Three: Stephen S. Foster and Henry B. Blackwell: Women’s Rights as Men’s Rights ; Chapter Four: Robert Purvis and Henry Ward Beecher: Men v. Women’s Rights; Chapter Five: Frederick Douglass and Thomas Wentworth Higginson: The "Back Benches" of the Women’s Rights Movement;

"Accessible and involving ... the object of study resonates with our own present. It highlights the many tensions brought by the confluence of personal ideals and collective actions, as well as the problematic relation between "allyship" and oppressed groups. ... The book eventually contributes to an intellectual genealogy of the American feminist movement."- Adeline Vasquez-Parra, Canadian Journal of History Volume 56 Issue 2