Lydia Maria Child

Lydia Maria Child 1802-80, American author and abolitionist, b. Lydia Maria Francis, Medford, Mass. She edited (1826-34) the Juvenile Miscellany, a children's periodical. She and her husband (David Lee Child, whom she married in 1828) were devoted to the antislavery cause; she wrote widely read pamphlets on the subject in addition to editing (1841-49) the National Anti-Slavery Standard, a New York City weekly newspaper. Selections from her Standard essays were published in 1999 as Letters from New-York. Other writings include several historical novels and a book on the history of religions. Her Frugal Housewife (1829) went through many editions.

Bibliography: See her letters (with introduction by J. G. Whittier, 1883, repr. 1970); biographies by H. G. Baer (1964), M. Meltzer (1965), W. S. Osborne (1980), D. P. Clifford (1992), and C. Karcher (1994).

Child, Lydia Maria (1802–1880), novelist, journalist, antislavery reformer.One of nineteenth‐century America's most influential writers and activists, Child, the daughter of a Medford, Massachusetts, baker, was largely self‐educated. After making her literary debut with a novel of interracial marriage, Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times (1824), she won popularity by editing the nation's first children's magazine (Juvenile Miscellany, 1826–1834) and publishing two best‐selling domestic advice manuals, The Frugal Housewife (1829) and The Mother's Book (1831). Upon her marriage in 1828 to the Whig newspaper editor David Lee Child, the two agitated against the forced removal of the Cherokees from Georgia and soon against slavery as well, joining forces with William Lloyd Garrison in 1831.

Child produced more than a dozen books and many articles and short stories for the abolitionist cause, besides editing the National Anti‐Slavery Standard (1841–1843). Of these works, the most enduring is An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans (1833), which sets U.S. slavery in an international historical context, denounces all forms of racial discrimination, and refutes theories of African inferiority. An Appeal helped recruit such stalwarts as William Ellery Channing, Wendell Phillips, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Charles Sumner to the antislavery banner.

Child's pioneering History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations (1835) influenced such feminist theorists as Sarah Grimké, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Her Letters from New York (1843–1845), which publicized the plight of the city's poor, launched a new school of urban journalism. And her Progress of Religious Ideas, through Successive Ages (1855) combated bigotry and dogmatism by highlighting the commonalities between Christianity and other faiths.
See also Antebellum Era; Cherokee Cases; Feminism; Indian History and Culture: The Indian in Popular Culture; Indian Removal Act; Racism; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Deborah Pickman Clifford , Crusader for Freedom: A Life of Lydia Maria Child, 1992.
Carolyn L. Karcher , The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child, 1994.

Carolyn L. Karcher