They Had No Voice

Denny Abbott first encountered the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children at Mt. Meigs as a twenty-one-year-old probation officer for the Montgomery County Family Court. He would became so concerned about conditions for black juvenile offenders there -- including hard labor, beatings, and rape -- that he took the State of Alabama to court to win reforms. With the help of the U.S. Justice Department, Abbott won a resounding victory that brought change, although three years later he had to sue the state again. In They Had No Voice, Abbott details these battles and how his actions cost him his job and made him a pariah in his hometown, but resulted in better lives for Alabama’s children. Abbott also tells of his later career as the first national director of the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center, where he helped focus attention on missing and exploited children and became widely recognized as an expert on children’s issues.

Denny Abbott first encountered the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children at Mt. Meigs as a twenty-one-year-old probation officer for the Montgomery County Family Court. He would become so concerned about conditions for black juvenile offenders there--including hard labor, beatings, and rape--that he took the State of Alabama to court to win reforms. With the help of the U.S. Justice Department, Abbott won a resounding victory that brought change, although three years later he had to sue the state again. In They Had No Voice, Abbott details these battles and how his actions cost him his job and made him a pariah in his hometown, but resulted in better lives for Alabama's children. Abbott also tells of his later career as the first national director of the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center, where he helped focus attention on missing and exploited children and became widely recognized as an expert on children's issues.

Argues that Black literature cannot be characterized strictly as social realism, and offers a textual analysis of works by eighteenth- to twentieth-century Black writers.

For some reason, which may be either arrogance or apathy, the British are very slow to state their case to the world. At present the reasons for our actions and the methods which we have used are set forth in many Blue-books, tracts, and leaflets, but have never, so far as I know, been collected into one small volume. In view of the persistent slanders to which our politicians and our soldiers have been equally exposed, it becomes a duty which we owe to our national honour to lay the facts before the world. I wish someone more competent, and with some official authority, had undertaken the task, which I have tried to do as best I might from an independent standpoint.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote these two novellas at the beginning and end of her years of writing and political activism. Though written at different times, they explore some of the same issues: ideals of femininity as celebrated by the cult of sensibility, the unequal education of women, and domestic subjugation. Mary counters the contemporary trend of weak, emotional heroines with the story of an intelligent and creative young woman who educates herself through her close friendships with men and women. Darker and more overtly feminist, The Wrongs of Woman is set in an insane asylum, where a young woman has been wrongly imprisoned by her husband. By presenting the novellas in light of such texts as Wollstonecraft’s letters, her polemical and educational prose, similar works by other feminists and political reformists, the literature of sentiment, and contemporary medical texts, this edition encourages an appreciation of the complexity and sophistication of Wollstonecraft’s writing goals as a radical feminist in the 1790s.