It's 1837, and fourteen-year-old Quaker Myra Harlan's mother has died, forcing her to leave her home and family in the country to live in Philadelphia. Shocked by the racism she sees all around her and caught in the aftermath of the Orthodox-Hicksite split in the Religious Society of Friends, Myra longs for her mother and struggles to make friends until she finds the Female Anti-Slavery Society, Lucretia Mott, Sarah Douglass, and - ultimately - herself.

Having left her country home after her mother dies, the heroine struggles to make friends in Philadelphia until she finds Lucretia Mott, Sarah Douglas, and other women abolitionists.. "Readers of 'The Back Bench' will find young Myra Harlan's pre-Civil War times uncannily like our own ... burdened by religious dispute, racial strife, and human pettiness" (Margaret Lacey). From the back cover. ( )