Education
Born into America's new middle class, Lydia Maria Child was educated at home, at a local "dame school" and at a nearby women's "seminary." She went to live for some years with an older married sister.
abolitionist novelist women's rights activist
Born into America's new middle class, Lydia Maria Child was educated at home, at a local "dame school" and at a nearby women's "seminary." She went to live for some years with an older married sister.
The next phase of Child's life followed the pattern begun with Juvenile Miscellany, The Frugal Housewife and the Appeal. She published another novel, Philothea, in 1836, Letters from New York in 1843-45 and Flowers for Children in 1844-47. She followed these with a book depicting "fallen women," Fact and Fiction, in 1846 and The Progress of Religious Ideas (1855), influenced by Theodore Parker's transcendentalist Unitarianism.
Both Maria and David became more active in the abolitionist movement. She served on the executive committee of Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society -- David had helped Garrison found the New England Anti-Slavery Society. First Maria, then David, edited the National Anti-Slavery Standard from 1841 to 1844 before editorial differences with Garrison and the Anti-Slavery Society led to their resignations
In 1868, she returned to her early interest in Native Americans and published An Appeal for the Indians, proposing solutions for justice. In 1878 she published Aspirations of the World.
Lydia Maria Child died in 1880 at Wayland, Massachusetts, at the farm she had shared with her husband David since 1852.
Quotations:
• The cure for all the ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrows, and the crimes of humanity, all lie in the one word 'love'. It is the divine vitality that everywhere produces and restores life.
• We pay our domestic generous wages, with which they can purchase as many Christmas gown as they please; a process far better for their characters, as well as our own, than to receive their clothing as a charity, after being deprived of just payment for their labor. I have never known an instance where the "pangs of maternity " did not meet with requisite assistance; and here at the North, after we have helped the mothers, we do not sell the babies.
• An effort made for the happiness of others lifts above ourselves.
• I was gravely warned by some of my female acquaintances that no woman could expect to be regarded as a lady after she had written a book.