For the past twenty years, historians have recognized the role that \u271\u27 women played in the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement. Works by Gerda Lerner, Nancy Hewitt,jean Fagan Yellin, Clare Taylor, and Maria Diedrich, among others, have demonstrated that women spoke, organized, promoted, and wrote on behalf of the movement to end slavery. Yet, the published volumes of the Frederick Douglass Papers have obscured that fact. Although women supported and often saved Douglass throughout his career, their voices have been conspicuously absent from the seven volumes of the Douglass Papers. With the impending publication of the first correspondence volume, which covers the years 1842-52, the project can correct this oversight by emphasizing the contributions of women to abolitionism and to Douglass\u27s life. Moreover, in these letters, Douglass\u27s complex relationships with women and among the women themselves become more apparent and intriguing
