First Woman in Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Presumed first edition/first printing in paperback. Trade paperback. Very good. Black mark on bottom edge.. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. xv, [1], 804, [2] p. Illustrations. Chronology. Notes. Works. Index. For half a century Lydia Maria Child was a household name in the United States. Hardly a sphere of nineteenth-century life can be found in which Lydia Maria Child did not figure prominently as a pathbreaker. Although best known today for having edited Harriet A. Jacobs's "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, " she pioneered almost every department of nineteenth-century American letters--the historical novel, the short story, children's literature, the domestic advice book, women's history, antislavery fiction, journalism, and the literature of aging. Offering a panoramic view of a nation and culture in flux, this innovative cultural biography (originally published by Duke University Press in 1994) recreates the world as well as the life of a major nineteenth-figure whose career as a writer and social reformer encompassed issues central to American history. From Wikipedia: "Lydia Maria Francis 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. Her journals, fiction and domestic manuals reached wide audiences from the 1820s 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 Wood" about Thanksgiving. Her grandfather's house, restored by Tufts University in 1976, still stands near the Mystic River on South Street in Medford, Massachusetts. Child was born in Medford, Massachusetts on February 11, 1802, to Susannah Rand Francis and Convers Francis. Her older brother, Convers Francis, became a Unitarian minister. 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. Child chanced to read an article in the North American Review discussing the field offered to the novelist by early New England history. Although she had never thought of becoming an author, she immediately wrote the first chapter of a novel entitled Hobomok. Encouraged by her brother's commendation, she finished it in six weeks, and published it. From this time until her death she wrote continually. She taught for one year in a seminary in Medford, and in 1824 started a private school in Watertown. In 1826, she began the publication of the Juvenile Miscellany, the first monthly periodical for children issued in the United States, and supervised it for eight years. Lydia Child and her husband began to identify themselves with the anti-slavery cause in 1831 through the personal influence and writings of William Lloyd Garrison. 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. As 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. In 1833 her book An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans was published. It 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.