About Speak a Word for Freedom

Publication Date – September 8, 2015 Speak a Word for Freedom: Women against Slavery is a fascinating nonfiction account of the lives of fourteen female abolitionists, some of whom were slaves themselves, from the 1700s to the present day.

From the early days of the antislavery movement, when political action by women was frowned upon, British and American women were tireless and uncompromising campaigners. Without their efforts, emancipation would have taken much longer. And the commitment of today’s women, who fight against human trafficking and child slavery, descends directly from that of the early female activists.

Speak a Word for Freedom: Women against Slavery tells the story of fourteen of these women. Meet Alice Seeley Harris, the British missionary whose graphic photographs of mutilated Congolese rubber slaves in 1906 galvanized a nation, and Hadijatou Mani, a woman from Niger who successfully sued her own government in 2008 for failing to protect her from slavery. Also read the stories of Elizabeth Freeman, Elizabeth Heyrick, Ellen Craft, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Anne Kemble, Kathleen Simon, Fredericka Martin, Timea Nagy, Micheline Slattery, Sheila Roseau, and Nina Smith.