BOOK REVIEWS [ 189 ] States after a voyage of seven weeks and four days. Settling in a house at 39 Thompson Street, the family adjusted rapidly to the new country; and when, not long after she had reached New York, Hannah had her ninth child, a boy, he was named, fittingly enough, George Washington Blackwell. Initially it appeared that the financial reverses-which had forced Samuel Blackwell, a sugar refiner, to leave England might be corrected in the United States. After moving from Thompson Street the farBy lived in reasonably comfortable quarters on Long Island, and then in Jersey City. They were a serious-minded group. Although partaking of the amusements offered by New York (except dancing, which unlike the theatre was forbidden by their beliefs) their major interest was in reform. Thus, it was not long before they were engaged in the antislavery movement; and William Lloyd Garrison, Gerrit Smith, and Theodore Dwight Weld, stalwarts of the abolition movement, were friends and houseguests. The destruction of his refinery by fire and the effects of the Panic of 1837 reduced Samuel Blackwell's resources, and in May 1838, he determined to move to Cincinnati. Unhappily, Samuel Blackwell died the following August, and the day after his funeral the family funds consisted of twenty dollars. But his children rallied, and the boys did whatever odd jobs could be managed, while the girls taught school. These efforts, plus taking in boarders, supported the family. The economic struggle never subdued the intellectual interests of the Blackwells, who believed firmly that although the present world was yet imperfect, until the millenium arrived, it was a positive duty to work for social, moral, and economic change. All five daughters and four sons of Samuel and Hannah Blackwell are treated with tolerance and respect by the author. They are never made to seem bizarre or eccentric, and Mrs. Hays (author of an excellent biography of Lucy Stone called Morning Star) approaches the Blackwells intelligentiy and sympathetically. For example, the story of Henry Blackwell's courtship of Lucy Stone is droll, and it is probably inevitable that Elizabeth Black- well stands out most vividly in this book. Doubtless, this is because of her fame as the first woman in the United States to become a doctor. Medical education before the Civil War was wretched at best, but it is affecting to read of Elizabeth Blackwell's tribulations. For example, she nearly starved herself so as to be less likely to blush if embarrassed by the anatomical studies presented at the Medical Institute of Geneva College (now Hobart College) in New York State. If, however, it is Elizabeth Blackwell who may be known to most readers, she is placed in proper perspective by Mrs. Hays in writing of the other members of the family. Anna Blackwell was a gifted poetess; Samuel Blackwell, Jr., married Antoinette Brown, the first woman ordained as a minister in the United States; and, once slavery had been outlawed, the Blackwells became prominent in the cause of woman suffrage. As a picture of the "new woman" of the nineteenth century, as effected in