Lydia Maria Child

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The popularity and moral force of the American author Lydia Maria Francis Child (1802-1880) contributed to the impact radical abolitionists exerted on the antislavery debate that preceded the Civil War.

Lydia Maria Francis was born in Medford, Mass., of an old New England family, on Feb. 11, 1802, and revealed early her sensibilities and intelligence. Her novels of pioneer life, Hobomok (1824) and The Rebels (1825), opened a literary career for her. Juvenile Miscellany, an annual that she instituted in 1826, pioneered in its field, and her later publications appealed to girls and wives. In 1828 she married David Lee Child, a Harvard College graduate who had capped an idealistic, adventurous youth by becoming a lawyer. As a state legislator and editor of the Massachusetts Journal, he seemed on a successful path.

Both were converted to abolitionism by William Lloyd Garrison, but it was Lydia who most startled conventional circles with her Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833). This tract made abolitionists of such noteworthy persons as the Reverend William Ellery Channing and Charles Sumner. It also, however, closed various social circles to her and caused her book sales to fall. Her Juvenile Miscellany suspended, she pressed on as author and abolitionist. She published several abolitionist compilations, as well as biographies of notable women and the groundbreaking History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations (1835). Her husband introduced beet sugar manufacture in the United States and penned important abolitionist pamphlets. However, he was impractically dedicated to agricultural experiments, and his wife was required to manage their often-constricted finances.

In 1840 Child assumed the editorship of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, representing Garrison in New York. While there she wrote Letters from New York (1843, 1845), which contained much of contemporary interest. Her husband joined her in the work in 1843. The next year, embittered by factional differences between abolitionists, she returned to private life, settling in Wayland, Mass. Among her later books was Progress of Religious Ideas through Successive Ages (1855), which once more broke ground in its religious liberalism.

When John Brown was wounded in the raid on Harpers Ferry, Va., in 1859, Child asked permission to nurse him; this resulted in an exchange of letters which were read nationwide. Correspondence between Lydia Maria Child and Gov. Wise and Mrs. Mason of Virginia (1860) exhibited her abolitionist prose at its strongest.

Child's later writings struck a summary note, as in Looking toward Sunset (1864). Many of her works were outmoded, but her own character evoked admiration. She survived her husband 6 years, dying on July 7, 1880. A memorial volume, Letters (1883), was introduced by John Greenleaf Whittier and included Wendell Phillips's funeral address.

Further Reading

Two biographies of Child are Helene G. Baer, The Heart Is like Heaven: The Life of Lydia Maria Child (1965), and Milton Meltzer, Tongue of Flame: The Life of Lydia Maria Child (1965). She is discussed in numerous works, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Contemporaries (1899), and Margaret Farrand Thorp, Female Persuasion: Six Strong-minded Women (1949). Her works are described in volume 2 of Jacob Blanck, Bibliography of American Literature (1957).

Additional Sources

Clifford, Deborah Pickman, Crusader for freedom: a life of Lydia Maria Child, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

Karcher, Carolyn L., The first woman in the republic: a cultural biography of Lydia Maria Child, Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.

By far the most important figure in ballad studies, his work still dominates the field. Born in Boston, Mass., Child enrolled as a student at Harvard College in 1842, and stayed there, as teacher, for the rest of his life, becoming Harvard's first Professor of English in 1876. Child had already edited books on ballads and early poetry, when he encountered Svend Grudtvig's Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser (1853-90), and realized the potential for further work on the subject. After the Civil War Child, with characteristic thoroughness, set out to investigate all known sources of British ballad material. Aware of the poor quality of previous scholarship and the reputation that ballad collectors and editors had for tampering with the texts, he was determined to trace original manuscripts and early printed material and his success on this score is evidenced by the fact that Harvard has the best collection of ballad source material in the world, and his name is still synonymous with ballad scholarship 100 years later. The five volumes of Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published between 1882 and 1898 represent his life's major achievement, and it is difficult to overstate their influence. Not only did he gather all the known key primary material and bring his own considerable knowledge and scholarship to bear on the material, but he single-handedly defined the scope of the genre, and the 305 ballads he selected rapidly became a closed corpus available for further study but not amenable to extension or diminution. Successive ballad scholars have suggested a handful of other items which could perhaps have been included, but the majority have accepted the corpus without demur. While this has had certain administrative benefits, there is no doubt that this situation has had a stultifying effect on ballad studies for many years.

Child's scholarship is indeed impressive. For each ballad, he gives several texts, with extensive comparative commentary which discusses motifs and plots on an international scale. When he died he had finished editing the ballad texts and commentaries, and his pupil and colleague George L. Kittredge saw the last parts through the press. Unfortunately, Child did not have time to write the proposed introductory essays on balladry, and this lack of a definitive word from the acknowledged master has bedevilled ballad scholarship ever since, particularly in the realm of definition. By modern standards, Child's one major failing was that as a literary scholar he was little interested in the music of the ballads, but this shortcoming was more than compensated by Bertrand H. Bronson's The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads (4 vols., 1959-72).

Bibliography
The full bibliography list is available here.

• English and Scottish Popular Ballads in five volumes (1882-1898)
• G. L. Kittredge, ‘Francis James Child’ in volume I of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, pp. xxiii-xxxi
• Sigurd Bernhard Hustvedt, Ballad Books and Ballad Men (1930)
• Tom Cheesman and Sigrid Riewerts, Ballads Into Books: The Legacies of Francis James Child (1997)

(1802-1880), abolitionist and author. Child grew up among the educated elite of Boston. At the age of twenty-two she published her first novel and became a member of the prestigious Boston Athenaeum. She continued to write while teaching school, and in 1826 her interests fused: she started Juvenile Miscellany, the first periodical for children in America. Shortly thereafter she married David Child, whose checkered career as lawyer, editor, and reformer did not endear him to her conservative family.

During this period Child did some of her most popular domestic writing and earned an international reputation, especially with the popular advice manual The Frugal Housewife (1829). Good Wives (1833) and The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations (1835) were ambitious biographical studies that reflected her serious commitment to women's rights. She also became an ardent abolitionist. In her antislavery jeremiad, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), she proclaimed her allegiance to the cause of immediate emancipation. This declaration cost her the popular following her writings had won. The Boston literary establishment considered her a radical, and she was turned out of the Athenaeum.

Child, however, followed her own conscience. She was sidetracked from public activities in 1837 when her husband decided to raise sugar beets to replace sugarcane, a product of slave labor. But in 1841 she left their farm where they lived in little more than a shack and ventured alone to New York City to edit the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Her editorial style was deemed too meek by antislavery activists, and she resigned in 1843. She then supported herself by churning out newspaper columns and writing for periodicals; her Letters from New York (1843-1845) recaptured some of the audience she had lost earlier. When her husband arrived in New York in 1843 (and tried his hand at the Standard before he was forced to resign in 1844), she asked her lawyer to separate their financial affairs, because, she said, "to pump water into a sieve for fourteen years is enough to break down the most energetic spirit. I must put a stop to it or die."

The Childs were estranged for nearly a decade but returned to Massachusetts in 1850. After another failed attempt at farming, they moved in with her father in Wayland. Child seemed reconciled now to her marriage. Although she regretted having no children, she wrote that David "serves me for husband and 'baby and all.'" She wrote religious histories, antislavery tracts, a novel (Romance of the Republic about mulattoes in New Orleans), and a book on the plight of Indians. She also helped Harriet Jacobs publish her compelling autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Child published a final volume, Aspirations of the World, two years before her death, but she never fully regained the popularity of her early years.

Bibliography:

Jane Pease and William Pease, Ladies, Women, and Wenches (1990); Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters (1990).

Author:

Catherine Clinton

See also Abolitionist Movement; Literature.

Quotes:

"Childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kindly, sunshiny old age."

"A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth. Instead of its bringing sad and melancholy prospects of decay, it would give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world."

"Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father!"

"Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of the character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning."

"The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos."

"Home -- that blessed word, which opens to the human heart the most perfect glimpse of Heaven, and helps to carry it thither, as on an angel's wings."

See more famous quotes by Lydia M. 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 1 Early life 2 Marriage and family 3 Abolitionism and Women's Rights Movements 4 Indians' Rights work 5 Publications 6 References 7 See also 8 External links

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.

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.

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.

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]

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)

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

See also

• Over the River…Life of Lydia Maria Child, Abolitionist for Freedom. (2008) Documentary, narrated by Diahann Carroll.
• Edward Strutt Abdy

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Lydia Maria Child

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Lydia Maria Child

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Lydia Maria Child

• Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist:Lydia Maria Child
• UVA: Etexts for Lydia Child
• Biography from Spartacus Educational
• UVA: Freedman's Book
• The Frugal Housewife, Dedicated to Those Who Are Not
• Biography at Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project
• The Mother's Book
• Works by Lydia Child at Project Gutenberg
• Biography from American National Biography
• selection of writings by Lydia which were in The Liberty Bell, an abolitionist gift book, at the website of Bucknell University, edited by Glynis Carr
• Lydia Maria Francis Child Correspondence.Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
• Letters of Lydia Maria Child, arranged by Harriet Winslow Sewall, from the Internet Archive

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