Lydia Maria Child

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  (Redirected from Lydia M. Child)
Jump to: navigation, search
File:Lydiachild.jpg
Lydia Child

Lydia Maria Child (February 11, 1802 – October 20, 1880) was an American abolitionist, women's rights activist, opponent of American expansionism, Indian rights activist, novelist, and journalist and Unitarian.

Her writing in journals and anti-slavery fiction reached wide audiences from the 1830s through the 1850s. She at times shocked her audience, as she tried to take on issues of both male dominance and white supremacy in some of her stories.

Despite these challenges, Child was later most remembered for her poem, Over the River and Through the Woods about Thanksgiving. (Her grandfather's house, restored by Tufts University in 1976, still stands near the Mystic River on South Street in Medford, Massachusetts.)

Contents

[edit] Early life

She was born in Medford, Massachusetts, to Susannah Rand Francis and Convers Francis. Child received her education at a local dame school and later at a women’s seminary. Upon the death of her mother, she went to live with her older sister in Maine where she studied to be a teacher. During this time, her brother, Convers, a Unitarian minister, who had been educated at Harvard College and Seminary, saw to his younger sister’s education in literary masters such as Homer and Milton.

[edit] Marriage and family

Lydia married Boston lawyer David Lee Child. His political activism and involvement in reform introduced her to the social reforms of Indian rights and Garrisonian abolitionism.

She was a long-time friend of activist Margaret Fuller and frequent participant in Fuller's "conversations" held at Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's North Street bookstore in Boston.

Another friend, Harriet Winslow Sewall‎, arranged Child's letters for publication after her death.

[edit] Abolitionism and Women's Rights Movements

Child was a women's rights activist, but did not believe significant progress for women could be made until after the abolition of slavery. She believed that white women and slaves were similar in that white men held both groups in subjugation and treated them as property instead of individual human beings. Despite the fact that she worked towards equality for women, Child made her opinion known that she did not care for all-female societies. She believed that women would be able to achieve more by working alongside men. Child, along with many other female abolitionists, began campaigning for equal female membership in the American Anti-Slavery Society, a controversy which later split the movement. Her book An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans argued in favor of the immediate emancipation of the slaves without compensation to slaveholders, and she is sometimes said to have been the first white person to have written a book in support of this policy. She "surveyed slavery from a variety of angles - historical, political, economic, legal, and moral" to show that "emancipation was practicable and that Africans were intellectually equal to Europeans."[1]

Child, a strong supporter and organizer in anti-slavery societies, helped with fundraising efforts to finance the first anti-slavery fair, which abolitionists held in Boston in 1834. In 1839, she was elected to the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and became editor of the society's National Anti-Slavery Standard in 1841.

Child also served as a member of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s executive board alongside Lucretia Mott and Maria Weston Chapman during the 1840s and 1850s. She also wrote short stories exploring through fiction the complex issues of slavery. Examples include "The Quadroons" (1842) and "Slavery's Pleasant Homes: A Faithful Sketch" (1843). She wrote anti-slavery fiction to reach people beyond what she could do in tracts. She also used it to address issues of sexual exploitation which affected both the enslaved and the slaveholder family. In both cases she found women suffered from the power of men. The more closely Child addressed some of the abuses, the more negative reaction she received from her readers. Too much reality was more than they could bear.[2]

In the end, however, Child made the decision to leave the paper because she refused to promote violence as an acceptable weapon for battling slavery. The abolitionists’ inability to work together as a cohesive unit angered Child. The constant bickering amongst them caused a permanent estrangement which forever separated Child from the AASS. In quotes, Child stated that she believed herself to be "finished with the cause forever." She did continue to write for many newspapers and periodicals during the 1840s, and she promoted greater equality for women. However, because of her negative experience with the AASS, she never fought again outright for women’s rights or suffrage movements in organized movements or societies.

In the 1850s Child responded to the Senate beating of her good friend Charles Sumner by writing her poem entitled “The Kansas Emigrants.” The outbreak of violence in Kansas brought about a certain change in Child’s opinion of the use of violence. Along with Angelina Grimke, another proponent for peace, she acknowledged the need for the use of violence to protect antislavery emigrants in Kansas. Child also sympathized with the radical abolitionist John Brown. While she did not condone his zealous violence, she deeply admired his courage and conviction and even wrote to Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise offering her services at Brown’s sickbed. In 1861, Child helped Harriet Ann Jacobs with her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

[edit] Indians' Rights work

Title page of Hobomok, 1824

Child's first novel, Hobomok, was about an interracial relationship between a white woman and a Native American man, who was the father of her son. They divorced and the heroine remarried, reintegrating her and her child into Puritan society. This issue of miscegenation, or mixed relationships, was a theme Child used in later anti-slavery fiction as well, as she believed it connected systems of oppression: male dominance and white supremacy. It was a succès de scandale.[3] Her novel was published anonymously under the gender-neutral sobriquet 'an American'.

During the 1860s, Child wrote pamphlets on Indian rights. The most prominent, An Appeal for the Indians (1868), called upon government officials, as well as religious leaders, to bring justice to American Indians. Her presentation sparked Peter Cooper's interest in Indian issues, and led to the founding of the US Board of Indian Commissioners and the subsequent Peace Policy in the administration of Ulysses S. Grant.

Child died in Wayland, Massachusetts, aged 78, on October 20, 1880, at her home at 91 Old Sudbury Road. She was buried at North Cemetery in Wayland.[4]

[edit] Publications

  • Hobomok: A tale of Early Times, by an American (1824)
  • The Rebels (1825).
  • Juvenile Miscellany (1826)
  • The First Settlers of New England (1828)
  • "The Indian Wife" (1828
  • The American Frugal Housewife (1829)
  • The Mother's Book (1831)
  • The Girl's Own Book (1833)
  • An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1833)
  • The Oasis (1834)
  • Philothea (1836)
  • The Family Nurse (1837)
  • The Liberty Bell (1842), included stories, such as "The Quadroons"
  • "Slavery's Pleasant Homes: A Faithful Sketch" (1843, short story
  • Letters from New York (1843)
  • A Boy's Thanksgiving Day (1844) This is a Thanksgiving favorite. Read at [1]
  • Rose Marian and the Flower Fairies (1850)
  • Isaac T. Hopper: A True Life (1853)
  • The Freedmen's Book (1865)
  • A Romance of the Republic (1867)
  • An appeal for the Indians (1868)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Shirley Samuels, The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, p.64-70
  2. ^ Shirley Samuels, The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, p.64-70
  3. ^ Shirley Samuels, The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 59
  4. ^ Ehrlich, Eugene and Gorton Carruth. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982: 63. ISBN 0195031865
  • Karcher, Carolyn L. The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child. Durham: Duke UP, 1994.
  • Harrold, Stanley. American Abolitionists. Essex, England: Pearson Education Limited, 2001.
  • Salerno, Beth A. Sister Societies: Women’s Antislavery Societies in Antebellum America. DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005.
  • Teets- Parzynski, Catherine. “Child, Lydia Maria Francis.” American National Biography Online. http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00127.html.
  • "Child, Lydia Maria (Francis)" American Authors 1600 – 1900. H. W. Wilson Company, NY 1938.
  • WorldCat Accessed March 14, 2008
  • Amazon.com Accessed March 14, 2008
  • "A Boy's Thanksgiving Day." Women's History: Poems by Women. Jone Johnson Lewis, editor. URL: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/thanksgiving/a/child_thanks.htm?p=1 Accessed March 14, 2008

[edit] Internal Links

[edit] External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about:
Search Wikiquote Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Lydia Maria Child
Search Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Lydia Maria Child
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Maria_Child"
Personal tools