Lydia Moland on 19th Century Crusader, Lydia Maria Child

Historian Lydia Moland’s new book resurrects Lydia Maria Child. Now mostly forgotten, Child was one of the 19th century’s most popular authors; she wrote best-selling novels and guidebooks for housewives, and edited the first American children’s magazine. And then she jeopardized her entire career by becoming an outspoken and influential crusader against slavery. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
I now, as ever, would avoid any discussion of the
woman question. But when a man advises me to withdraw
from a society or convention, or not to act there
according to the dictates of my own judgment, I am
constrained to reply, thou canst not touch the freedom of
my soul. I deem that I have duties to perform here.

(00:29):
I make no onset upon your opinions and prejudices. But
my moral responsibility lies between God and my own conscience.
No human being can have jurisdiction over that. Those are
the words of nineteenth century author and abolitionist Lydia Mariah Child,

(00:50):
an enormously influential figure, has been mostly forgotten today. Her
words are read here by historian Lydia Moland. Recent book
should bring back the public recognition Child so richly deserves.
I'm a land Revere and this is Seneca's on women
to hear. We are bringing you one hundred of the

(01:13):
world's most inspiring and history making women you need to hear.
In the eighteen twenties, Lydia Mariah Child was one of
the most popular writers in America. She wrote a blockbuster
novel about interracial romance. She published a guide book for housewives,

(01:33):
and she found it the first American magazine for children.
And then she threw away that success by becoming a
fierce and controversial advocate for freeing the country's enslaved people
and for racial equality. Lydia Moland, a professor of philosophy

(01:53):
at Colby College in Maine, is the author of a
recent book about this amazing figure, Lydia Maria Child, a
radical American life. Listen and learn from Lydia Moland why
Lydia Maria Child is one of Seneca's on women to gear.

(02:18):
I'm speaking today to Lydia Moland. Welcome, Lydia. We're delighted
to have you with us for this conversation. Thank you
so much, as an honor to be here with you. Well.
In the nineteenth century, Lydia Mariah Child was famous as
an author and abolitionist, a feminist, a crusader for Native
American rights, but few contemporary Americans had ever heard of

(02:42):
her until your recent book. Um, if they did know
her name, I think it was for writing the classic
Thanksgiving song over the River and through the Woods, which
were all familiar with. But why has she been forgotten
and what should she be remembered for yes, it's a
wonderful question. So Child was born in eighteen o two,

(03:05):
and by the time she was a young woman still
in the eighteen twenties, she was already a beloved and
very famous author. She'd written a couple of novels, she'd
written some children's literature, she'd written a self help book,
which I think we'll talk about in a moment um.
So she was really the nineteenth century equivalent of a

(03:26):
household name already. And then in eighteen thirty she converted
to abolitionism, which was the at that time very radical
claim that slavery should end immediately and without compensation to
enslavers and this um. Some people have compared that to

(03:50):
the radical nature of that to being to saying that
you were a communist. In the nineteen fifties, for instance,
it was just a real social taboo. Most Northerners, if
they disapproved of slavery, thought that it was probably unfortunate,
but there wasn't a whole lot they could do about it,
and probably it was best to just leave it well

(04:12):
enough alone. But Child decided in eighteen thirty, when she
converted to abolitionism, that she would devote the rest of
her life to fighting slavery and fighting for racial justice.
So she spent the next three years researching and writing
a book that she published in eighteen thirty three called
an Appeal for that class of Americans called Africans. And

(04:37):
this book was just a a fire hose of arguments
against the excuses that people had used, that white Americans
had used to turn away from caring about slavery. So
there was a chapter on politics, and a chapter on history,
and a chapter on economics, um all showing that slavery

(05:00):
was an evil that the United States needed to eradicate immediately.
And then in the last chapter of that book, she
turns her attention to her fellow white Northerners and makes
very clear that it was their complicity in slavery that
allowed slavery to continue. And this was so shocking and

(05:22):
so insulting to her readership all over the United States,
but especially in Boston, that she was really ostracized for
this publication. Her books went out of print, people stopped
speaking to her, her family was embarrassed by her um
and she but she spent the next fifty years of
her life just fighting racial injustice in every way. She

(05:47):
knew how Um, including her life intersecting and fascinating ways
with the Civil War era, like the caning of Charles
Sumner Um, John Brown's insurrection, Robert gould Shaw's death, like
all of these ways that her life that we can
learn about those episodes from the way she interacted with them.

(06:10):
All of that to say, that's what she should be
famous for, that lifetime of dedication to fighting racial injustice.
It was definitely her life's work. And the fact that
she is instead famous for one of our most sentimental poems,
the irony of that would not be lost on her.

(06:30):
Let me just put it that way. M hm, Well,
you certainly bring her alive and in the real sense
that she should be remembered for. I'm wondering as you're speaking,
how did you get interested in her? Yes, this is
such a wonderful, serendipitous story. So this was really after
the election I had I'm a philosopher by training. I'd

(06:53):
been writing about German philosophy for my whole academic career.
But after the election of twin sixteen, I just had
the sense that I needed to turn to women. I
needed to find out how women had faced moral emergencies
in the United States, and I had a kind of
distant memory that women had been important in the abolitionist movement.

(07:18):
I went to this Lessenger Library at Radcliffe Institute at Harvard,
and I asked the librarians there to help me find
a woman who had thought philosophically in the quest to
end enslatement in the United States, and completely serendipitously, I

(07:38):
was given a box of letters that had a letter
by her in it, and it just electrified me. I
was so moved by it, and so touched by how
hard she had worked for the cause and how much
of her life she had dedicated to it that when
I started reading more about her and realized everything else

(07:59):
that she and um, I thought, she really needs to
be better known, and I think she can help us
at a moment of moral emergency in our country today. Well,
and how good for us that you did. Did you
face any particular challenges in writing about her? I would
say one of the more humorous challenges is that, since

(08:22):
she's so little known, her collected correspondence is mostly on microfiche. UM,
I hope your listeners even remember what that was. It's
a very antiquated mode of storing information. UM, I remember,
you know, working with it in the eighties. But her UM,

(08:43):
her letters haven't been updated. There is a wonderful collection
of them, and a reader that has been published by
Caroline CarShare that has some of her writings. But I
needed to spend week after week after week at a
microfiche machine at the Boston at NAUM reading her correspondence.
So that was a kind of amusing challenge. And I

(09:04):
would say the other challenge was just trying to learn
enough of my own country's history to be able to
explain things to readers like why were there violent anti
abolitionist mobs in the North for years? And why were
so many abolitionists uneasy with John Brown's raid? And why

(09:29):
were there so many um, contorted arguments made around the
fifteenth Amendment. All of those things just took a lot
of um reading and thinking and researching on my part.
It was a joy and it was a challenge, yeah,
and you had to be determined to be able to
do it. Uh. And some of those challenges well. Her

(09:50):
first book was a novel called Obamack, which was published
in eighteen four, which she was only twenty two, and
it caused a scandal tell us why what it was
about that book that was so controversial. Yes, this is
a fascinating story. So this novel was essentially about a

(10:11):
love triangle that featured a young white European settler named
Mary Um, a young Englishman named Charles, and a Native
American warrior whom she called Hobbamock, and the way the
plot develops. At a certain point, Mary thinks that Charles
has died and for complicated reasons, blames her father for it,

(10:35):
and as a kind of revenge against her very puritanical father,
she runs away and marries this Native American warrior. Oh,
it's very clear loves her dearly. She lives with him,
she loves him in return. They have a child together,
and then lo and behold, Charles shows up again. He's

(10:57):
not dead Um, and Hobbamock at that point decides to
seed his right to both his wife and their son
to this European So he just um to disappears into
the forest and has never seen again. So, as I
say in the book, it's it's almost like she managed

(11:19):
to put together a plot that included an insubordinate daughter
and indictment of a puritan, inter racial sex, a mixed
race Child, and a kind of divorce. I mean, it
was like all of the taboos um at once that
she was breaking. But even beyond that, the book was
scandalous because it did not end the way most literature

(11:43):
about Native Americans at that point ended, which was in
a kind of violent victory by the European settlers over
the Native Americans. So instead, the picture that Child gives
us is of a Native American warrior who is willing
to go away in a kind of noble sacrifice. And

(12:03):
that was part of her way of saying, in a
way that she really regretted later, but it was her
way of saying, um, we do not want to perpetuate
injustice against Native Americans, but they will eventually fade away.
And it was about five years later that she completely
changed her mind about that. She decided that holding that

(12:25):
kind of opinion was wrong and injurious to Native Americans.
And she really spent the rest of her life arguing
when she talked about Native Americans that they had every
right to continue to exist. That that European settlers did
utterly fascinating. So we go on to eighty six, when

(12:46):
she founded and edited the first American Children's magazine The
Juvenile Miss Selamy. What were her views on children and
how should how should they be treated? Those views, Yes,
the these were wonderful publications for children that she did
in the eighteen twenties. They were full of like The

(13:09):
Juvenile Miscellany was full of games and puzzles, and fiction
and non fiction and poetry. It was a quarterly publication,
so people long into middle age would remember how excited
they were when it arrived at their doorstep and they
could read it. And it was popular up and down

(13:29):
the East Coast. And exactly as you say, her views
about children are really interesting and in many ways very
progressive UM, insofar as she thought that children should be
treated kindly. You should never lie to your children, You
should encourage their native curiosity. You should give them toys
that helped them learn. You should treat them with respect.

(13:52):
They should get lots of exercise. They should play outside.
The girls should also get to play. UM. And she
was also very stern and principled. But there's always a
kind of undercurrent that children are human beings to be
treasured and nurtured, and UM given a foundation to become

(14:14):
good American citizens by developing virtues like honesty and integrity
and patients. So they're they're wonderful even to read today.
In fact, believe it or not, I found one in
a gift shop the other day. Um, just along with
like Christmas ornaments and things people were buying, and the
owner of the shop said that they were selling really well.

(14:36):
So my goodness. So did somebody revive the magazine? Yes?
And I'm sorry this wasn't the magazine. I should have
corrected that. This was something she wrote called the Mother's Book,
book full of advice for mothers. She herself never had children,
but she had been living with a sister who had
a large family, and she apparently picked up a lot

(14:58):
of parenting advice from that. M hm. So then we
go to eighty nine when she published her most popular book,
The Frugal Housewife. Now what made it so different from
her other books of the time or other guide books
of the time, and why was it such a hit? Yes,
this was another thing she published that people would talk

(15:19):
about well into adulthood. They would remember how their mothers
cooked out of it, and they would in some cases
remember how disappointed they were that the Frugal Housewife books
said that their mothers shouldn't buy preserves for them, which
I guess was the equivalent of buying candy or something.
Um it was a book exactly as the title said.

(15:42):
Um Child wanted to write a cookbook for those who
were not aspiring to be wealthy. So it was a
wonderful thing for the these beginning decades of the United
States when a lot of people didn't have a lot
of money and did need to know how to make
do with preserving things and conserving things, knowing how to

(16:06):
use every part of a cut of meat or every
part of a vegetable for um cooking. It also had
wonderful just house cleaning tips about getting rid of bed
bugs or stuffing a mattress with feathers, or helping someone
who had sprained their ankles. So it was really meant

(16:27):
to empower Americans to be self sufficient. And it was
also a kind of political treatise insofar as every once
in a while, in the midst of talking about some recipe,
she'll just break off and say something like, we really
will never succeed as a country unless we know how

(16:48):
to resist becoming an aristocracy, and will only manage to
avoid being an aristocracy if we all know how to
cook and clean for ourselves. So it's really a multilayered
publication that I think appealed so much to Americans at
that moment who wanted to figure out what it meant

(17:10):
to be American in very everyday ways like how to
roast a goose, and also big principled ways like what
kind of attitude to have towards consumption or towards aristocratic
tendencies and income inequality. Senecas one hundred Women to hear

(17:34):
will be back after the short break. Well, she was
very prolific, it seems, as a writer, because she went
on to publish an appeal in favor of that class
of Americans called Africans, the first book length anti slavery work.

(18:00):
So tell us what was notable about this book and
what was its impact. Yes, the that appeal was in
a tradition already that had, as one example, David Walker's Appeal.
And David Walker was a black man living in Boston

(18:20):
and he published something. It had a very long title.
It's usually called Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.
And that book was um a denunciation of American slavery,
both in religious terms and in political terms. So David
Walker excoriated Americans for calling themselves Christians and being willing

(18:43):
to enslave people and to torture those people, to break
up families, um to steal their labor. And he also
excoriated them for failing America's political principles. And he was
very explicit about Thomas Jefferson in particular, being an example
of someone who could articulate very lofty values and then

(19:06):
was not living up to them. Those were a kind
of series of addresses. And the way I think Child
expands on that and and goes in a different direction,
in a more argumentative direction, is that she really accumulates
evidence from travelers accounts in the South, from Southern laws

(19:28):
about who could be enslaved, how much an enslaved person
should be punished, under what conditions, um enslaved people could
be allowed to read. All of these things that were
evidence for Northern readers, especially that American enslavement was particularly evil. So,

(19:48):
as I said earlier, she has whole chapters on why
slave economies are worse than economies that use free labor.
She has a whole chapter on how cow worldly Northern
politicians had been in the face of Southern enslavers. And
then in this last chapter, as I say, she very

(20:10):
clearly Um indicts northerners for profiting from the slave trade,
for profiting on crops that had been grown by enslaved people,
like cotton, but then also for being um for having
racist beliefs that meant that they treated black people terribly

(20:32):
so keeping them out of churches and schools and stage
coaches and hotels. She talks about people yelling racial epithets
in the street, Um, and she just very clearly says
without that prejudice in the North, slavery would not succeed
in the South m hm. And I've lived in the

(20:55):
North my whole life, and I do think that we
all too often and have a kind of sense of superiority,
moral superiority, and so far as we think that slavery
was a Southern problem and racism is a Southern problem,
and Child was just not having that. She would not
allow her fellow northerners UM to forget that slavery existed

(21:18):
in part because of their willingness to indulge in these
kinds of prejudices. Did the influence of this work live
on for some time or yes, yeah, thank you for
reminding me of that part of the question. Absolutely. So,
there are a couple of really influential abolitionists who were
one over to abolitionism through her writing. One was Charles Sumner,

(21:42):
so the the senator from Massachusetts who much later, right
before the Civil War, was beaten bloody and unconscious on
the Senate floor for his abolitionist beliefs. So he was
one of her um disciples, as it were. Another one
um was Wendell Phillips, who was one of the most

(22:03):
important orators of the abolitionist movement, who became an abolitionist
after he read the Appeal. And then the other one
is that I'll just mentioned is Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who
was one of the people who funded John Brown's insurrection
in Virginia, and he too said that he came to
abolitionist beliefs through Child's writings. But there are also people

(22:26):
would write to her through her whole life and say
things like I read your works when I was a child,
and they formed my life's opinions, and I'm so grateful
to you for setting me on a good course of
moral behavior. Well that's high praise, and clearly she made
a difference. Um which is rather extraordinary. So where was

(22:48):
she on women's rights. Did she have any relationships with
other feminists of the time. Was that something that she
wrote about or spoke out about. Yes, definitely. I would
say that her relationship to women's rights was a little
more complicated than her attitude towards abolitionism. She felt so

(23:08):
uncomplicated and devoted to the abolitionist cause, but early in
her life she felt sort of ambivalent about promoting her
rights as a woman, and I think that's really interesting.
She would often say, I'm more comfortable advocating for other
people's rights than for my own, which is admirable of course.

(23:32):
And there's no question that the abolition of slavery was
a moral imperative um in a way that she very
rightly responded to. She also got really caught up in
one of the most painful moments in the abolitionist movement,
which was when abolitionists split over the question of whether

(23:52):
women should be allowed to speak. So, as many of
your listeners will know, there's a Biblical passage that's often
been used to claim that women should not be allowed
to speak in public. At the beginning of the abolitionist movement,
among the people who were the most radical, that was
not a problem, and women were actually encouraged to speak,

(24:15):
especially if they were leaders in the movement like she was.
But as the movement grew and started to include more
conservative members, they started to say, we need the women
to stand back and not to advocate, and certainly not
to speak in public. And so that put people like

(24:36):
Child and other women that she was working with, like
the grim Key Sisters, um in the position of having
to fight for women's rights first in order to continue
to fight for the abolition of slavery. So, if you
don't mind, I have a really quick quote that I
just love from her from this stage of the of

(24:58):
the fight within the abolish this movement, she says, I now,
as ever, would avoid any discussion of the woman question.
But when a man advises me to withdraw from a
society or convention or not to act there according to
the dictates of my own judgment, I am constrained to reply,

(25:19):
thou can'st not touch the freedom of my soul. I
deem that I have duties to perform here. I make
no onset upon your opinions and prejudices, But my moral
responsibility lies between God and my own conscience. No human
being can have jurisdiction over that. So that was her

(25:41):
her response to the men who wanted her to back
off so that she, as a woman, wouldn't get in
the way of more conservative members of the movement wanting
her not to speak. Well, good for her, Yeah, exactly
the way ahead of her time, right wait, yeah, absolutely,
And then I will say that, Um, after the war,

(26:02):
she was very supportive of Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Susan B.
Anthony's um efforts to get suffrage for women. So there
are very enthusiastic letters between them, um at a certain stage.
But then, as many of your listeners will know, at
a certain point, Um, Elizabeth Katie Stanton, especially when it

(26:25):
became clear that the fifteenth Amendment was going to give
the vote to black men but not to women, Standon
and Anthony decided to oppose the fifteenth Amendment and unfortunately
did so sometimes in very racist language and tried to

(26:45):
frighten white men out of voting for the fifteenth Amendment
out of fear of black men. And child just detested this. Um.
She she saw immediately what damage it would do and
how wrong headed it was. So she essentially broke from
that part of the movement. She didn't associate with Stanton

(27:07):
and Anthony anymore, and instead, through her efforts behind people
like Francis Ellen, Watkins, Harper, and Lucy Stone who were
supporting the fifteenth Amendment and also working for women's suffrage.
So Child was someone who her whole life felt very
deeply and painfully the limitations imposed on her for being

(27:29):
a woman. Uh And she, especially towards the end of
her life, wrote with great passion and just argumentative power
about that. Well, she she seems to have accomplished so much.
How was she able to do that? And you were
just mentioning her great desire to break away from the

(27:51):
conventions that we're holding women back and writing about that forcefully.
How was she able to do that? This is such
a great question, and I you know, in a way
to me it still feels like a mystery sometimes how
some people marshal the resources to dedicate their whole lives
to something, despite you know, in her case, suffering real

(28:13):
poverty for most of her life. After she threw away
her literary career. I'll just mentioned two brief things that
I that were not barriers for her that I think
often are barriers for women, and certainly were in the
nineteenth century. The first was that she had a husband
who loved her mind and who supported her intellectual pursuits

(28:36):
and who encouraged her to write in these quote unquote
masculine spheres like politics and economics. Um. They had a
very complicated marriage that was not always good for her.
It got so complicated at a certain point that they
separated for about ten years. But unlike someone like Julia Ward,

(28:57):
how she was not always fighting the husband who was
trying to hold her intellect back. Um. And they also
never had children. They did want children, and it was
a great sorrow to them that they never had any.
But she was also very clear that she would not
have been able to do what she did had she
had children. And I wish that that weren't still a

(29:19):
barrier for many women, but as we know it, it
often is. But I will also say that she had
a kind of vision of what she wanted her country
to be. She she loved this country so deeply, and
she loved its principles so deeply that she was heartbroken
at all of the ways that we were not living

(29:41):
up to our potential, and so I think that gave
her enormous energy to fight to get Americ pitkins to
actually live up to their beliefs. And she also had
just a deep conviction about human equality. Many abolitionists, as
your listeners will know, we're in favor of end slavery,

(30:01):
but they were not in favor of racial equality. So
there was an enormous amount of racism within the abolitionist
movement itself. And while Child's record on these things is
not perfect, she definitely had attitudes towards Black Americans um
that were patronizing or that put burdens on them to

(30:22):
behave a certain way so that white people would accept them. More,
she did believe in racial equality, and that gave her
a kind of passion and compassion for anyone who was
being treated unjustly that I think made her really powerful.

(30:43):
And I'll just mention one other thing that I think
is so interesting, which is that I think she was
really good at knowing what she was good at and
what she loved, and then marshaling those things to fight
the fight that was most important to her. So she
would sometimes say things like I love this one committee

(31:05):
work is not my work. So so she recognized that
committees were important to abolitionism, but she hated them. So
when she would get on a committee, she would recognize
that it kind of sapped her energies and cramped her powers,
and so then she would re dedicate herself to doing
what she could do with real passion and talent, and

(31:27):
that was often writing. You know, you said that after
the election, you were just so eager to write about,
you know, some of the early pioneering women and what
they were able to achieve despite challenges. And I wonder
what lessons you take from her life, because clearly she's

(31:49):
a most fascinating figure. Yes, thank you for that question.
I love thinking about that. As as I've said, I'm
actually a philosopher, and I teach moral philosophy. Be so
I think a lot about the moral questions, the big
moral questions in our lives, and I like to think
about how I want to live my own life and

(32:09):
how I can learn from Child's life how to live
my own. One of the things that I admire the
most about her is she had a kind of fierce humility.
So she knew that she could be part of the problem.
She knew that white people and that white Northerners, and
that white women often got in the way of racial progress,

(32:33):
and she knew that change had to start with her,
and that if she just kept pointing at the South
and saying, oh, well, if they would just change, everything
would be better, she wouldn't be actually fixing what she
could fix, which was her own behavior. So I think
I've learned a lot about that from her, about listening

(32:54):
and trying to be humble, and being more aware of
ways in which um I might be contributing to even
the problems that I care most about. And I also
think that reading about Child's life has triggered in me
what I sometimes call moral paranoia, by which I just
mean if Child was operating in her early twenties as

(33:18):
a well meaning woman who thought of herself as progressive
and compassionate, and yet was missing some of these major
truths about the treatment of Native Americans and also about enslavement,
then what am I missing? What are the moral problems
that are staring me in the face but that I

(33:41):
am blind to. I think mass incarceration is one that
I think about a lot, as a problem that's very
hidden to most of us, but that has many of
the same hallmarks of moral atrocity that slavery did um
and climate change is another one that think way too
many of us are willing to um be lulled back

(34:06):
into complacency by arguments that we know are bad. And
I think Child was so good at diagnosing, essentially saying,
I can see that you know that something's wrong here. Now,
let us think together about what better arguments we can
make about how we need to change our lives. You know,

(34:28):
you not only have introduced us to a truly remarkable
person in our nation's history, Lydia Maria Child, but you
have given us some very profound questions to think about
as well for our own lives. And I can't thank
you enough for this wonderful conversation. Thank you so much,

(34:49):
Lydia Moland. Thank you, it's been a pleasure to speak
with you. Lydia Maria Child is truly an incredible figure
in a mirror Rican history. Here are three things I
took from that conversation. First, what an example of courage.
Lydia Mariah Child had it all, respect, popularity as an author,

(35:14):
great sales, and gave it all up to speak out
about the injustice of slavery. Second, Mariah Child was able
to accomplish so much partly because she knew her own
strengths and weaknesses. She turned down committee work on abolition,
even though she realized it was important, because it would

(35:38):
sap her energy from her most impactful work writing. Finally,
as Lydia Molin tells us, Mariah Child's example invites us
to look at our own lives before we try to
change the world. What are our blind spots and what
can we fix within ourselves that maybe attributing to the

(36:00):
larger problem. To learn more about this nineteenth century powerhouse,
check out the book Lydia Mariah Child, A Radical American Life,
and tune in next time to hear about our next
featured woman and discover why she's one of Seneca's one

(36:21):
Women to Hear. Seneca's one hundred Women to Hear is
a collaboration between the Seneca Women Podcast Network and I
Heart Radio, with support from founding partner Pung. Have a
Great Day,