In June 1809 the widow Elizabeth Ann Seton moved to Emmitsburg, Maryland and founded Saint Joseph’s Academy and Free School to educate Catholic girls. On July 31 she started the Sisters of Charity to help take care of poor children, and in 1811 they adopted the rules Vincent de Paul had created in 1633 for the Daughters of Charity in France. Archbishop Carroll approved the rules in January 1812, and Mother Seton and 18 sisters took vows in July 1813. In January 1817 the state of Maryland recognized the Sisters of Charity as an institution for the purposes of charity and usefulness especially to care for the sick, help the aged and those in need, and to educate young females. Seton died in January 1821, and the Roman Catholic Church canonized her in September 1975.
The Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children in New York had been founded by Isabella Graham in 1797, and by 1816 they were helping 202 widows and 500 children. Her daughter Joanna Graham Bethune assisted and began the first school for infants in New York in July 1827. She also organized the Orphan Asylum Society, a Female Sabbath School Union, and the Society for the Promotion of Industry that employed 500 women.
The Boston Female Moral Reform Society was founded in 1835 by seventy women, and by 1837 the New York society had 15,000 members. That society in 1840 became the American Female Moral Reform Society with 555 auxiliaries. They began publishing the weekly Advocate for Moral Reform in 1835 and within a few years had 20,000 subscribers. A Boston society began in 1836 and became the New England Female Moral Reform Society in 1838 and published the bimonthly Friend of Virtue for fifty years with 3,000 subscribers by 1841.
The first public schools for girls in America were started in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1824 and in New York in 1826, but there were not many others until after the Civil War. Oberlin College in Ohio began in 1833 accepting students of any race, and in 1837 they admitted four women.
In 1816 Hannah Mather Crocker wrote “The School of Reform,” noting that the good order of society depends on the virtuous habits of citizens. In that short essay she warned against intemperance and indulging sensual appetites that degrade human nature. In 1818 she published Observations on the Real Rights of Women, with Their Appropriate Duties, Agreeable to Scripture, Reason and Common Sense. She suggested that if men and women received the same education, they would improve equally. In the introduction she asserted that the Creator endowed women with equal mental faculties with the same right to judge and act for themselves as men have. From God comes the immortal and rational soul and the mental ability to reason on the nature of things. Crocker believed that Christianity ends “servile dependence” and abolishes slavery by replacing them with love and friendship. She drew upon the great writings on women’s rights by Mary Wollstonecraft, Madame de Staël, and Hannah More. Crocker’s Reminiscences and Traditions of Boston was published the year of her death in 1829.
Emma Willard had opened a boarding school in Middlebury, Vermont in 1807, and in 1819 she published A Plan for Improving Female Education that she addressed to the Legislature of New York. She believed that education should perfect the students’ moral, intellectual, and physical nature so that they could be useful to themselves and others. She included domestic education to make good wives and mothers. She gave speeches to raise money, and in March 1821 the Common Council of Troy approved a tax to bring in $4,000 for a female academy. Willard founded the Troy Female Seminary which opened in September as 90 young women from seven states enrolled. Gradually she added courses on algebra, geometry, history, geography, and physical science. In 1822 she co-authored a textbook on geography with William Channing Woodbridge, and in 1829 she published her History of the United States, or Republic of America.
Mary Lyon (1797-1849) was brought up on a farm in Buckland, Massachusetts, and she attended the Sanderson Academy in Ashfield. She became friends with Amanda White and lived in the White home. In 1821 the Whites helped Mary go with Amanda to Byfield Seminary near Boston. The teacher Zilpah Polly Grant became her friend. Soon Mary Lyon was teaching back in Ashfield. Grant also taught at the Adams Female Academy at Derry, New Hampshire for three years before founding the Ipswich Female Seminary in 1828, and Lyon worked as her assistant. They decided to admit only girls of at least 14 years, and in 1831 they had 198 students.
Lyon wanted to start another seminary, and she was advised by influential men including Edward Hitchcock, who became president of Amherst College and her first biographer. Rev. Roswell Hawks helped her raise $27,000 from 1,800 people in 91 towns, and they laid a corner stone in October 1836. The Mount Holyoke Seminary opened in November 1837 with four teachers and 116 pupils, and by 1849 they would have 16 teachers and 224 students. Lyon insisted on charging only $64 a year for board and tuition, but students had to work two hours a day and be at least 16. The course was three years to earn an A. B. certificate. The curriculum included geography, history, physiology, botany, rhetoric, and Pope’s Essay on Man. Lyon especially wanted to produce qualified teachers and capable missionaries. Their basic principles included Biblical religion, cultivating benevolence, intellectual culture, physical health that included a calm mind, and social and domestic objectives that included economy, independence, and household skills.
Harriet Martineau, a British writer on morals and politics and a pioneer of sociology, visited the United States for thirteen months from 1834 to 1836. She wrote her 800-page Society in America, and published it in England in 1837. In her chapter “Morals of Politics” she noted that it will take much discussion to describe what has occurred in a society of “self-governing people, who profess to take human equality for their great common principle, and the golden rule for their political vow.”1 She found that the best men were not in office because “the morally inferior who succeed, use their power for selfish purposes, to a sufficient extent to corrupt their constituents.”2 She observed that most politicians are not honest and that the most conscientious men shun public life. She included a section on “Apathy in Citizenship” and noted that many people do not even vote let alone participate in advocacy. She criticized the mobs that try to suppress abolitionists and cause riots which are accepted and rarely prosecuted because those participating are well dressed gentlemen who do not consider themselves part of a mob. She also considered newspaper reporters sinners because it is easy to make people aware of only one side of a question by keeping them from knowing about certain affairs. She wondered which is worse: to diffuse widely what is not true or to suppress what is true.
In the part on “Sectional Prejudice” she described it as “hatred.” Even colored people who are considered citizens have their houses and schools torn down while a few conscientious people try “to lift up this degraded race out of oppression, and their country from the reproach of it.”3
In the section “Political Non-existence of Women” she wrote,
Governments in the United States have the power
to tax women who hold property;
to divorce them from their husbands;
to fine, imprison, and execute them for certain offences.
Whence do these governments derive their power?
They are not “just,” as they are not derived
from the consent of the women thus governed.4
They can also enslave some women.
In the chapter “Morals of Economy” she wrote,
The servile class rises, by almost imperceptible degrees,
as the dawn of reason brightens towards day.
The classes by whom the hand-work of society is done,
arrive at being cared for by those who do the head-work,
or no work at all: then they are legislated for,
but still as a common or inferior class,
favoured, out of pure bounty, with laws, as with soup,
which are pronounced “excellent for the poor:”
then they begin to open their minds
upon legislation for themselves;
and a certain lip-honour is paid them,
which would be rejected as insult if offered to those
who nevertheless think themselves
meritorious in vouchsafing it.
This is the critical period out of which
must arise a new organisation of society.5
On “Morals of Slavery” she wrote,
I was heart-sick of being told of the ingratitude of slaves,
and weary of explaining that
indulgence can never atone for injury;
that the extremest pampering for a life-time,
is no equivalent for rights withheld,
no reparation for irreparable injustice….
Every man who resides on his plantation
may have his harem,
and has every inducement of custom, and of pecuniary gain,
to tempt him to the common practice.6
She noted that the law has children of slaves follow the fortunes of their mother. Thus slaveholders often sell and bequeath their own children. In New Orleans mothers raise their girls to be what they are, the mistresses of white gentlemen. Some boys are sent to France, but others work as slaves or are sold. During her visit she learned of four men who were burned alive. She discovered that the law applies a fine of $200 for torturing a slave but up to $500 for teaching a black to read.
Martineau discussed the morals of manufacturing and commerce. In Cincinnati merchants met “to destroy the right of dissension” and passed a resolution recommending violence for that purpose. She complained that the intellect of women is restricted by the methods of education and by discipline.
The industrial revolution resulted in many women working long hours in factories with unhealthy conditions. The first labor strike involving only women workers was at Dover, New Hampshire in 1828. In 1832 the author John Neal of Portland, Maine began speaking out for women’s rights. In 1836 the newly arrived immigrant Ernestine Rose presented the first petition demanding a Married Woman’s Property Law to the New York legislature. In the 1840s several strikes led by Sarah Bagley of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association were aimed at reducing the workday to ten hours. Other reforms in this period allowed married women to own property in most states. Magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale promoted professional and physical education for women so that they could be physicians; she also exposed the menace of corsets. Many women liberated their bodies by wearing more comfortable clothing and were called Bloomers. Clarina Howard Nichols began promoting women’s rights as the editor of the Windham County Democrat in Vermont in 1843 and did so for ten years.
Catherine Beecher was born on 6 September 1800 and was eleven years older than her famous sister Harriet. Their father Lyman Beecher was an influential Calvinist evangelist. In 1826 he helped found the American Temperance Society, and he gave and published six sermons on intemperance which were translated into several languages. When their mother Roxana died in 1816, Catherine withdrew from school to take over the domestic duties of raising her seven younger siblings, cooking, and making clothes. Her fiancé died at sea in 1822, and she never married. In May 1823 Catherine began the Hartford Female Seminary for girls in Connecticut, and it became a respected academy with a staff of eight teachers. In 1829 she published Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education, writing,
It is to mothers and to teachers
that the world is to look for the character
which is to be enstamped on each succeeding generation,
for it is to them that the great business of education
is almost exclusively committed.
And will it not appear by examination
that neither mothers nor teachers
have ever been properly educated for their profession?
What is the profession of a woman?
Is it not to form immortal minds,
and to watch, to nurse, and to rear the bodily system,
so fearfully and wonderfully made,
and upon the order and regulation of which
the health and well-being of the mind so greatly depends?....
But is it not the business, the profession of a woman
to guard the health
and form the physical habits of the young?
And is not the cradle of infancy
and the chamber of sickness sacred to woman alone?
And ought she not to know at least some
of the general principles of that perfect and wonderful piece
of mechanism committed to her preservation and care?...
If all females were not only well educated themselves
but were prepared to communicate in an easy manner
their stores of knowledge to others;
if they not only knew how to regulate
their own minds, tempers, and habits
but how to effect improvements in those around them,
the face of society would speedily be changed.7
She argued that if females were well educated, they would know how to bring about improvements which would quickly change society. She emphasized the forming of moral character and habits. From 1828 to 1830 she organized a women’s auxiliary to help her father and other ministers who opposed President Jackson’s removal of the Cherokees. She arranged public meetings, circulated petitions, and wrote the pamphlet “To the Benevolent Women of the United States.”
In 1831 Catherine Beecher left the Hartford Seminary, and in the fall she financed the publishing of The Elements of Mental and Moral Philosophy, Founded upon Experience, Reason and the Bible. She believed that humans are primarily shaped by their social environment and that individuals seek the esteem and affection of others. In 1832 her father moved his family to Cincinnati, Ohio, and they worked with the influential families of Nathaniel Wright, Rufus King, and her uncle Samuel Foote. In the spring of 1833 Catherine founded the Western Female Institute dedicated to acquiring knowledge and moral development. Her address to the American Lyceum in New York in the spring of 1835 was published as “An Essay on the Education of Female Teachers.” She estimated that 90,000 teachers were needed in the West and that women could fill this need. She observed that teachers do not become wealthy, and most men will seek other employment. She called for more teachers’ seminaries for women.
Catherine Beecher debated the issues of women’s rights and abolition with the Grimké sisters, and in 1837 she wrote her “Essay on Slavery and Abolition with Reference to the Duty of American Females.” Beecher admitted that women hold a “subordinate relation in society to the other sex,” but she argued that that did not diminish women’s influence or her duties. Women have domestic virtues and great influence as teachers. She wrote,
Woman, whatever are her relations in life, is necessarily
the guardian of the nursery, the companion of childhood,
and the constant model of imitation.
It is her hand that first stamps impressions
on the immortal spirit, that must remain forever.
And what demands such discretion, such energy,
such patience, such tenderness, love, and wisdom,
such perspicacity to discern, such versatility to modify,
such efficiency to execute, such firmness to persevere,
as the government and education
of all the various characters and tempers
that meet in the nursery and schoolroom?
Woman also is the presiding genius who must regulate
all those thousand minutiae of domestic business,
that demands habits of industry,
order, neatness, punctuality, and constant care.
And it is for such varied duties that woman is to be trained.
For this her warm sympathies, her lively imagination,
her ready invention, her quick perceptions,
all need to be cherished and improved:
while at the same time those more foreign habits,
of patient attention, calm judgment, steady efficiency,
and habitual self-control, must be induced and sustained.8
In other pursuits she can cultivate the mental faculties of attention, perseverance, and accuracy. Beecher described the valuable reforms that were occurring in her time, writing,
Man is demanding disenthralment,
alike from physical force, and intellectual slavery;
and, by a slow and secret process, one nation after another
is advancing in a sure, though silent progress.
Man is bursting the chains of slavery
and the bonds of intellectual subserviency;
and is learning to think, and reason, and act for himself.9
In 1838 she published The Moral Instructor for Schools and Families: Containing Lessons on the Duties of Life, Arranged for Study and Recitation, Also Designed as a Reading Book for Schools. This book discussed the morality of material success and how to balance comforts and leisure with hard work. She believed that everyone can develop habits of industry and self-denial when they are needed.
Her most influential book, Treatise on Domestic Economy, was published in 1841 and was reprinted almost annually until 1856. Her Treatise explained how servants were not needed because of labor-saving devices. She even analyzed how body functions work. In 1842 she wrote Letters to Persons Who Are Engaged in Domestic Service.
Frances Wright was born on 6 September 1795 in Dundee, Scotland. Both her parents died in her third year. Her father had contributed to a reprint of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. Frances and her sister Camilla were raised by her grandmother and her aunt Frances Campbell in London and Devonshire. Young Frances was inspired by the American Revolution. After her older brother Richard was killed fighting the French in 1809, she inherited wealth and used it to educate herself in philosophy, politics, and history. She went to Glasgow in November 1816 and was influenced by Byron’s Childe Harold and wrote the poem “To Harold” that concluded,
Start—but ‘tis truth. There is a soul on earth,
Twin-born, the same, the counterpart of thine;
As strange, as proud, as lonely from its birth—
With powers as vast. Harold, that soul is mine!10
Frances and Camilla landed in New York in September 1818. Frances called herself a “spinster” and was known as Fanny or even as Fan. Her play Altorf: A Tragedy about Swiss independence was presented briefly in February 1819 and was published in May. In the preface she called for a new school of dramatic art in the United States, writing,
Here is the country where Truth
may lift her Voice without fear,
where the words of Freedom may
not only be read in the closet but heard from the stage….
The people of this great country in its infancy,
has brought the art of government to perfection
and is destined I would fondly hope, in its mature age,
to foster and advance every other art
and be at once the land of liberty and of genius.11
The Wright sisters returned to England in May 1820, and Frances published Views of Society and Manners in America in 1821. She included a discussion of the evils of black slavery, and she translated it into French. In 1822 she published her work on the philosophy of Epicurus as A Few Days in Athens.
Frances Wright wrote to the Marquis de Lafayette when he was in London, and she and Camilla followed him to the United States in September 1824. Fanny and Lafayette were guests of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello; she had sent him a copy of Altorf. While Lafayette toured the South, the sisters visited James Madison at Montpelier and then took steamers to New Harmony in Indiana where peasant Rappites from Germany led by George Rapp practiced Christian communism. They made and sold whiskey but were celibate and drank only water. Frances wanted to improve their condition as well as that of blacks, and she met and worked with George Flower who had helped ship free blacks to Haiti in 1823. He introduced her to Benjamin Lundy in Baltimore. In the September 1825 issue of his Genius of Universal Emancipation she published her Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in the United States without Danger of Loss to the Citizens of the South.
Frances attempted to raise private contributions and federal aid, and she bought 320 acres near Memphis, Tennessee to establish the Nashoba community. She also purchased eight slaves for about $4,000. In March 1826 single Fanny Wright presided over ground-breaking for the new town where slaves could work to gain their freedom in five years. Yet the land was poor; mosquitos caused malaria; and her health deteriorated in 1827. That year Lundy published her Nashoba Book. She corresponded with Mary Shelley and read Political Justice by Mary’s father William Godwin. Wright published her extensive “Explanatory Notes” on the principles of Nashoba in the Memphis Advocate. They practiced the morals of equality and responsibility, and no religious doctrines were taught in the schools.
On 4 July 1828 Wright became the first woman to make a major address on the national holiday. She opposed religious fervor and criticized what she called “The Christian Party in Politics.” She spoke on three Sundays that month in the Cincinnati Courthouse. She was influenced by the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham and the socialist Robert Owen. She emphasized facts and intelligence and promoted freedom and equality in education. Some Christians called her the “Priestess of Beelzebub.” She went back to New Harmony and became the editor-in-chief of the New Harmony Gazette and hired Phiquepal d’Arusmont to improve the printing. During her absence from Nashoba the overseer Gilliam had abused the slaves, and she replaced him with Camilla’s husband Richeson Whitby in October.
Frances Wright lectured from Boston to New Orleans in 1828 and 1829. She called upon fathers and husbands to end the mental bondage they imposed on their daughters and wives. She was castigated for believing in sexual freedom and miscegenation, and major newspaper editors including young William Cullen Bryant criticized her. She moved to New York with Robert Dale Owen, son of the famous socialist. They helped found the New York Workingmen’s Party in 1828 that demanded a ten-hour workday on April 28. During the summer the Mechanics’ Free Press became the first labor newspaper in the United States, and she spoke to the mechanics who were uniting in Philadelphia to discover their rights.
Wright encouraged other states to follow the noble example of New England in providing common schools, and she suggested education from the age of 2 to 16. She advocated a modest tax on the parents plus a tax on property that increased according to wealth. She advised that no inequality should enter the nurseries of a free nation, and she urged feeding at a common board.
Frances Wright is best known for her Course of Popular Lectures that began in 1828 and were published in New York in 1829. In the preface she described how her attention was gained by the United States which she called “the theatre where man might first awake to the full knowledge and the full exercise of his powers.”12 In her “Introductory Address to the Second Course” at the Masonic Hall in New York she was concerned firstly about the neglected female mind and her consequent dependence and secondly over the corruption of the public press. Since the modest Socrates and the gentle Jesus she had not found great reformers in her time
who have remembered the poor,
the ignorant or the oppressed,
raised their voice in favour of
more equal distributions of knowledge and liberty;
or dared to investigate the causes of vice and wretchedness,
with a view to their remedy.13
Her second lecture was on free inquiry as a way of obtaining just knowledge. She emphasized the need for equality between the two sexes, warning that “whenever we establish our own pretensions upon the sacrificed rights of others, we do in fact impeach our own liberties.”14 She said,
Equality is the soul of liberty;
there is, in fact, no liberty without it—
none that cannot be overthrown
by the violence of ignorant anarchy,
or sapped by the subtlety of professional craft.15
She considered it just and proper to respect the liberties of others that we claim for ourselves. She discussed how we can gain knowledge of ourselves and of the world around us. She suggested asking why of every teacher and every book. In her lecture on religion she advised using the educational methods of Pestalozzi.
Lecture 5 was on “Morals” which she defined as “the science of human actions or of human life,” and she considered the foundation for drawing the rules of that science “the ascertained consequences of human actions.”16 She believed that good is beneficial actions, and evil is those that are injurious. She emphasized mutual human relations and believed that human beings should be “free born and self-governing.”
Wright’s sixth lecture was on the “Formation of Opinions.” She opposed the persecution of opinions, and she “denounced the intriguing spirit, the feud-breeding faith, the honey-lipped but bitter-hearted hypocrisy”17 of proselytizing missionaries.
In her seventh and last lecture of the series “On Existing Evils and Their Remedy” at Philadelphia on 2 June 1829 she argued that for a nation to be strong, it must be united, be equal in condition, similar in habits and in feeling, and must be raised in national institutions as the children of a common family and citizens of a common country. She asked,
Can, then, the rich be without solicitude
when they leave to the mercy of a heartless world
the beings of their creation?
Who shall cherish their young sensibilities?
Who shall stand between them and oppression?
Who shall whisper peace in the hour of affliction?
Who shall supply principle in the hour of temptation?
Who shall lead the tender mind
to distinguish between the good and evil?
Who shall fortify it against the corruptions of wealth,
or prepare it for the day of adversity?18
In New York she and Robert Dale Owen coedited The Free Enquirer starting in January 1829. She criticized theology and advocated abolishing the death sentence and imprisonment for debt while supporting equal rights for all. She wanted to establish a free school system to house, feed, and educate all children. She paid $7,000 for the old Ebenezer Baptist Church that could seat 1,200 and turned it into the Hall of Science. In her address at the opening on April 26 she included odes set to music. Her purpose was to promote the acquisition of knowledge and its diffusion. She said, “Neither religion nor party politics have anything to do with knowledge and everything to do with quarreling.”19 She warned that “promulgating laws, establishing creeds, laying down maxims, and teaching opinions” tend to cause “mental paralysis.”20 She suggested that for free and rational people morals (ethics), or the science of human life, could take the place of religion.
In September they founded the Association for the Protection of Industry and for the Promotion of National Education. She still advocated gradual emancipation by allowing slaves to buy their freedom while preparing for their new state with liberal education. Her New Book of Chronicles was published in the Free Enquirer in January and February 1829.
In her “Parting Address” at the Bowery Theatre in New York in June 1830 Wright made clear that her goals were practical equality and universal improvement of all so that social and political relations will bring about one class as one family with each person independent and all cooperating according to their individual tastes and abilities in the promotion of the common good.
In 1830 Wright went with 18 adults and 16 children, who were slaves, from Nashoba to Haiti, where they were freed and placed on the property of Haiti’s President Boyer. She was accompanied by the printer and French teacher, Guillaume S. Phiquepal D’Arusmont, and she became pregnant with his child. She gave a parting address in New York in June before leaving for France. She married D’Arusmont in July 1831, and their second daughter died in 1832.
In 1835 Wright returned to the United States to lecture. She spoke on American Government at the Cincinnati Courthouse in May 1836, and in a speech on Chartered Monopolies she opposed the US Bank, believing that banking makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. She campaigned for Martin Van Buren in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. In the following winter she started the Manual of American Principles newspaper in Philadelphia. She advocated women’s property rights, sexual freedom, birth control, and reforming marriage laws. She was criticized by Catherine Beecher, and sometimes protestors disturbed her lectures. Wright published England, the Civilizer: Her History Developed in Its Principles in 1848. After breaking her hip, she died in December 1852.
Dorothea Dix was born on 4 April 1802 in Maine but was raised in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father was a traveling Methodist preacher and book-seller, but he and her mother were alcoholics and abused her. At the age of 12 Dorothea went to Boston to live with her wealthy grandparents. Her grandmother was a critical disciplinarian. Young Dorothea started a little school for young children and imitated the corporal punishment her parents had used on her, and she closed the school about 1820. She moved to Boston and attended a Congregational Church where the minister John Pierpont preached about social obligations. Her grandmother let her use a room in the barn behind Dix Mansion for a charity school in 1821.
Dix first heard William Ellery Channing speak in 1823, and she read his sermons. At a party with Ralph Waldo Emerson she met the young minister Ezra Gannett. They became friends, but she declined his marriage proposal. When her health became impaired, her grandmother persuaded her to finish her Conversations on Common Things; or, Guide to Knowledge: With Questions. That book was published in 1824 for children and women teachers, and it was so popular that it had 60 editions by 1869. In 1825 Dorothea produced Hymns for Children, Selected and Altered and Evening Hymns.
She suffered from illnesses and caught influenza on a visit to Worcester in 1826. Her doctor persuaded her to give up her school and go to a warmer climate, and that winter she went to Philadelphia and stayed with the family of Unitarian minister William Furness. She spent her days visiting humane institutions. When she came back to Boston in 1827, Dr. Channing invited her to spend the summer with his family at Portsmouth, Rhode Island. In 1828 she published Meditations for Private Hours. In 1830 Channing asked her to be a governess to his children during the winter on St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. She loved to study plants and animals and worked on a book about flowers. The island had only about 500 whites, but there were 3,300 slaves. Dorothea liked their music and dancing, but then she learned how badly they were treated where they worked in a boiling house. Although Channing realized that slave labor contributed to the northern merchants’ wealth, he believed,
All men, however poor or ignorant or despised,
are possessed of sacred rights,
inseparable from their human nature.21
Dorothea Dix’s health improved, and after returning to Boston she taught at a small boarding school in 1831, the year that public schools were opened to girls. She urged self-examination and encouraged them to write letters with questions that she stayed up late at night to answer. Dorothea had stories published in magazines, and ten in 1832 became the book American Moral Tales for Young Persons. The Unitarian Joseph Tuckerman impressed her with his ministry to the poor. She participated in church activities and learned that Channing’s social values included relieving the poor, better housing for Irish immigrants, temperance, education, and prison reform. In 1835 she was glad that Channing was opposing slavery.
In March 1836 Dix’s health broke down again, and Dr. Hayward told her that she must not teach any more. In April she embarked for England, and she was welcomed into the home of the philanthropist William Rathbone III by the River Mersey where her recovery was gradual. She suffered from melancholy (depression) which she had studied in Robert Burton’s comprehensive Anatomy of Melancholy. She read reports about the York Retreat and met the Quaker founder William Tuke who applied humane treatment and management. While she was in England, she learned that her mother and her grandmother had died. She returned to Boston in September 1837, and the Dix mansion was sold. She inherited wealth and lived with her sister-in-law next door to the Channings. She visited many institutions for the poor and liked the clean and orderly ones.
Harvard divinity student James T. G. Nichols was sent to instruct 20 women in the East Cambridge jail, and he asked Dix to take over the class. On 28 March 1841 she talked about Mary Magdalene and sang a hymn that they joined. She said she would return and asked to see other inmates. She was shocked to see the insane kept there locked in a cold room. A few days later she brought them warm clothes, blankets, and food, but at her next class she discovered they had not been given to them. She asked commissioners for stoves and was told she could write to the court which she did. Her request was granted and made sensational news. Dr. Channing advised her to confer with Samuel Gridley Howe, Charles Sumner, and Horace Mann.
Dix learned that the 1827 law to put the insane in lunatic asylums instead of jails was not being enforced. Mayor Samuel Eliot had established the Boston Lunatic Asylum in 1839. Dix consulted with the expert Dr. Luther Vose Bell on mental illness, and she did research on the history of mental illness at the Harvard and Boston libraries. She learned that Philippe Pinel began treating it as a medical problem at Salpêtrière and Bicêtre in France during the 1790s.
The United States had only eleven private asylums in 1841. That year Dorothea Dix set out to visit every town and village in Massachusetts to see how the insane were being treated in prisons, jails, almshouses, and workhouses. The young physician Edward Jarvis published the pamphlet Insanity and Insane Asylums, and in June 1842 Howe arranged for it to be evaluated in the North American Review. On September 8 Howe’s article on the abuse of the insane in East Cambridge based on her research was published in the Daily Advertiser. Dix consulted with Dr. Samuel Woodward, who ran the Worcester hospital, and his disciple Dr. John S. Butler at the Boston Lunatic Asylum. She wrote to the merchant Nathan Appleton asking him to provide books and money for the prison libraries in Middlesex and East Cambridge.
Very few of the mentally ill were in the three asylums, and she found that most were “confined in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens, chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience!”22 Yet she saw how simple kindness could produce beneficial results. She visited all of them in Massachusetts by the end of 1842. She learned that Dr. Channing had died in October, and Mrs. Channing let her use his study next to her rooms.
Dix wrote a Memorial for the Massachusetts legislature describing in 30 pages what she had observed. She made truth the highest consideration as she advocated for “helpless, forgotten insane and idiotic men and women.” She argued that it was unjust to confine them in jails, writing,
This state of things unquestionably retards the recovery
of the few who do recover their reason
under such circumstances,
and may render those permanently insane,
who, under other circumstances
might have been restored to their right mind.23
She concluded with excerpts from letters she received from sheriffs and other officials who agreed that jails and almshouses could not provide adequately for the insane. She urged legislation to help hundreds and thousands in the future. The legislature met on 25 January 1843. News of her report spread, and reactions were mixed. Some felt their reputations were tarnished and wrote rebuttal memorials, but Horace Mann understood her deep concern and wrote her a sympathetic letter. Dr. Bell of McLean Asylum, Woodward, and Butler substantiated her evidence. Charles Sumner had visited four almshouses and agreed with her assessment. The legislative committee approved of her work and proposed expanding the Worcester State Lunatic Hospital for 200 more patients. Although there were 958 insane persons in public institutions and 800 under private care, they were providing for only 500. The bill was passed on February 25.
Next Dix went to visit the institutions in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York. Rhode Island had no asylum, but Brown University’s founder Nicholas Brown died and left $30,000 in his will to build a hospital for the insane. Millionaire Cyrus Butler rarely gave to charities; but Dix talked to him, and he wrote a check for $40,000 saying it needed to be matched by an equal amount within six months. In two years they raised over $125,000, and Butler Hospital would open in 1847.
In the fall of 1843 her inspection tour of 1,700 miles reached nearly sixty counties in New York, and she visited the capital at Albany in November. The state of New York had created a separate hospital for the insane in 1821, and Governor Seward (1839-42) had appointed a special commission to study modern institutions. She had observed 1,500 lunatics and estimated that New York had twice that many. In January 1844 Dix wrote a Memorial for the New York Legislature recommending at least four new asylums, but the legislature voted for only one asylum at Utica. Amariah Brigham became Superintendent of the Utica asylum, and with Woodward and others he founded the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane. Brigham became the first editor of the American Journal of Insanity.
Dix visited Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, Kentucky, and the legislature in Nashville, Tennessee. Her efforts in Vermont led to the first state funding for the Vermont Asylum for the Insane. In April 1844 she wrote “Astonishing Tenacity of Life” for the Providence Journal describing how Abram Simmons had survived being confined in a cage for thirty years. In the summer she traveled by rail to Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and in November she visited the large Sing-Sing prison in New York. In January 1845 she finished her memorial for a state hospital in New Jersey. Dorothea Dix ate only three meager meals a day and slept five or six hours a night. In the years ahead she would go to the South.
Lydia Francis was born on 11 February 1802 in Medford, Massachusetts. Her older brother Converse helped her educate herself with books, and he went to Harvard University in 1811. Her mother died of tuberculosis in May 1814, and that year Lydia enrolled in Miss Swan’s Academy. From 1815 to 1821 she lived with her sister Mary in Norridgewock, Maine where she could observe Penobscot and Abenaki women. On 5 June 1817 Lydia asked in a letter to Converse whether Milton in Paradise Lost asserted “the superiority of his own sex in rather too lordly a manner.” In the summer of 1821 she moved in with her brother Converse who was a Unitarian minister in Watertown. Her father Converse baptized her in Medford’s Congregational church, and she took the middle name Maria. In February 1822 she joined the Swedenborgian Society in Boston. She became a Unitarian, taught at a seminary in Medford for one year, and in 1824 organized a private school in Watertown.
Lydia was influenced by the novels of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper. After writing her first novel in six weeks, in July 1824 she paid $495 to publish 1,000 copies of Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times “by an American.” Set in the colonies of Plymouth and Salem from 1629 to 1633, the heroine Mary Conant defies her Puritan father’s opposition to her relationship with Charles Brown, and she eventually marries the Narragansett native Hobomok. Lydia adapted her story from the 1820 poem, Yamoyden, A Tale of the Wars of King Philip by James Wallis Eastburn and Robert Sands. Her story rebels against patriarchy by showing the connection between male domination and white supremacy. Hobomok had to compete against James Everett Seaver’s Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824) about a white woman who married her Indian captor. Catharine Maria Sedgwick improved on Lydia’s novel in her 1827 Hope Leslie; or; Early Times in the Massachusetts.
To make up for her financial loss Lydia published Evenings in New England, Intended for Juvenile Amusement and Instruction in December 1824. That month she met David Lee Child. He knew Greek and Latin classics and was fluent in French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, and he spent time in Europe. She met Margaret Fuller in 1825 and began to read Locke and Madame de Staël.
Lydia’s second novel, The Rebels, or Boston Before the Revolution came out in 1825, and she dedicated it to George Ticknor who helped her meet the Massachusetts governor and Lafayette. She based The Rebels primarily on the 1823 biography of James Otis by William Tudor. In January 1826 David Child reviewed The Rebels in the Massachusetts Journal which he edited until 1832. Her first short story, “The Rival Brothers” was published by The Token in 1827 and continues The Rebels but portrays humble people.
Lydia had founded the bimonthly Juvenile Miscellany in September 1826 and edited it for most of its eight years. The magazine had a liberal Unitarian philosophy and was very popular with children and adults, and it supported her with $300 a year. To Ben Franklin’s aphorism, “Time is money,” she added, “Time is learning too. That is, a diligent use of it, will procure both wealth and knowledge.”24
Lydia became engaged to David Child in October 1827, and they married one year later. Her didactic novella, Emily Parker; or Impulse, not Principle, was published in 1827 as was her story “The Lone Indian” that portrays a Mohawk who marries an Oneida and shows the Iroquois confederation in a more positive light than James Fenimore Cooper did in The Last of the Mohicans. Mohawk prophets warn that the English will drive away the game the natives need for food. That year she also wrote the stories “The Indian Wife” about a Frenchman who marries and abuses a Sioux woman and “The Church in the Wilderness” which depicts how warfare blocks a mixture of nations, races, and cultures that could be beneficial to Europeans. In 1815 at Norridgewock, Maine she had learned of a white massacre of Indians in 1724, and she met the “majestic” Penobscot chief Etalexis on the shore of the Kennebec.
In 1828 Lydia published Moral Lessons in Verse and Biographical Sketches of Great and Good Men, and she wrote the historical novel, The First Settlers of New-England: or, Conquest of the Pequods, Narragansetts and Pokanokets: As Related by a Mother to Her Children, and Designed for the Instruction of Youth. In that bookshe explained how the Cherokees followed the advice that George Washington gave them to develop agriculture. Their farms prospered, and they manufactured cotton and woolen cloth. She pleaded that the Cherokees be allowed to retain their native inheritance and wrote, “It is, in my opinion, decidedly wrong, to speak of removal, or extinction of the Indians as inevitable.”25 In July 1827 they ratified their own constitution. The First Settlers, unlike Hobomok, portrayed the Indians’ perspective rather than an individual who betrayed the tribe. She wrote,
People seldom forgive those whom they have wronged,
and the first settlers appear to have fostered
a moral aversion to the Indians,
whom they had barbarously destroyed.26
She compared the Puritans to the Israelites who thought they were “authorized by God to destroy or drive out the heathens.” She suggested that God had made all nations of one blood so that they could live together and unite in marriage people of different colors. She did not promote this book, and it was not even noticed by the Cherokee Phoenix.
During the 1828 campaign her husband David Child criticized Andrew Jackson in the Massachusetts Journal for exterminating 557 Indians in the battle of Horseshoe in 1814 and for owning slaves, and in June 1829 he defended the rights of the Indians to the soil they cultivate. David was convicted in two libel suits and appealed. His wife Lydia turned from fiction and helped edit the Massachusetts Journal, and in August 1829 she reviewed a lecture by Frances Wright. In the fall Garrison reviewed her “Comparative Strength of Male and Female Intellect” in the Genius of Universal Emancipation, calling her “the first woman in the republic.”
On November 12 Lydia Child published The Frugal Housewife Dedicated to Those who are Not Ashamed of Economy. Her practical advice was popular, and she earned $2,000 in the next two years. The book sold more than 6,000 copies in the first year and had 35 editions before going out of print in 1850. Previous frugal housewife books appealed to the wealthy, but her book was written to help the poor and those with moderate incomes. She offered hundreds of household hints and provided many recipes. The book begins,
The true economy of housekeeping is simply
the art of gathering up all the fragments,
so that nothing is lost.
I mean fragments of time, as well as materials.
Nothing should be thrown away so long as it is possible
to make any use of it, however trifling that use may be;
and whatever be the size of a family, every member
should be employed either in earning or saving money.27
Her section “General Maxims for Health” begins,
Rise early. Eat simple food. Take plenty of exercise.
Never fear a little fatigue.
Let not children be dressed in tight clothes;
it is necessary their limbs and muscles should have full play,
if you wish for either health or beauty.
Avoid the necessity of a physician if you can,
by careful attention to diet.
Eat what best agrees with your system,
and resolutely abstain from what hurts you,
however well you may like it.
A few days’ abstinence, and cold water for a beverage,
has driven off many an approaching disease.
If you find yourself really ill, send for a good physician.28
In her chapter “Hints to Persons of Moderate Fortune,” she discussed the following topics: furniture, education of daughters, travelling and public amusements, philosophy and consistency, reasons for hard times, and how to endure poverty.
In February 1830 David Child lost his appeal and went to jail for about six months. Lydia published her first anti-slavery story, “The St. Domingo Orphans” in September and four months later “Jumbo and Zaire.”
Lydia Child published The Little Girl’s Own Book in January 1831. In June The Mother’s Book she wrote was influenced by Pestalozzi and has advice on childrearing and education. She “respectfully inscribed” her book “to American mothers on whose intelligence and discretion the safety and prosperity of our republic so much depend.” These are the chapters:
1. On the Means of developing the Bodily Senses in earliest Infancy.
2. Early Development of the Affections
3. Early Cultivation of the Intellect
4. Management in Childhood
5. Amusements and Employments
6. Sunday. Religion. Views of Death. Supernatural Appearances
7. Advice concerning Books. List of Good Books for various Ages
8. Politeness
9. Beauty. Dress. Gentility
10. Management during the Teens
11. Views of Matrimony
She warned against scolding and punishments but instead suggested pleasant thoughts and soothing actions such as combing the hair. She wrote, “Who can blame a child for fretting and screaming if experience has taught him that he cannot get his wants attended to in any other manner?”29 She argued against making a child ashamed because degradation is not healthy for character. She had been reading Garrison’s Liberator and believed that evil could be overcome with good. She advised mothers to teach their daughters about sex and encouraged girls especially to enjoy reading. Her story “The Industrious Family” showed how to transcend restrictions on females.
In January 1832 David Child attended the first meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and the Massachusetts Journal stopped publishing in February. Lydia Child published biographies of Madam de Staël and other women. Her Good Wives came out in April 1833 and praised women who were loyal to their husbands. This led the Southern Quarterly Review to commend her for teaching the art of living well with the highest wisdom.
In August 1833 Lydia Child published her Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. She dedicated it to Samuel J. May who had defended Prudence Crandall’s integrated school. In the Preface she wrote,
I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task
I have undertaken; but though I expect ridicule and censure,
it is not in my nature to fear them.
This 230-page treatise provided a comprehensive analysis of slavery with two long chapters on its history and compared it in different nations and ages. The second chapter explains and gives the evidence for the following propositions:
1. Slavery is hereditary and perpetual,
to the last moment of the slave’s earthly existence,
and to all his descendants, to the latest posterity.
2. The labor of the slave is compulsory and uncompensated;
while the kind of labor, the amount of toil,
and the time allowed for rest
are dictated solely by the master.
No bargain is made, no wages given.
A pure despotism governs the human brute;
and even his covering and provender,
both as to quantity and quality,
depend entirely on the master’s discretion.
3. The slave being considered a personal chattel,
may be sold, or pledged, or leased, at the will of his master.
He may be exchanged for marketable commodities,
or taken in execution for the debts, or taxes,
either of a living, or a deceased master.
Sold at auction, “either individually,
or in lots to suit the purchaser,”
he may remain with his family,
or be separated from them for ever.
4. Slaves can make no contracts,
and have no legal right to any property, real or personal.
Their own honest earnings,
and the legacies of friends belong,
in point of law, to their masters.
5. Neither a slave, nor free colored person, can be a witness
against any white or free man, in a court of justice,
however atrocious may have been the crimes
they have seen him commit:
but they may give testimony against a fellow-slave,
or free colored man, even in cases affecting life.
6. The slave may be punished at his master’s discretion—
without trial—without any means of legal redress,—
whether his offence be real, or imaginary:
and the master can transfer the same despotic power
to any person, or persons, he may choose to appoint.
7. The slave is not allowed to resist any free man
under any circumstances: his only safety consists in the fact
that his owner may bring suit,
and recover, the price of his body,
in case his life is taken, or his limbs rendered unfit for labor.
8. Slaves cannot redeem themselves,
or obtain a change of masters,
though cruel treatment may have rendered
such a change necessary for their personal safety.
9. The slave is entirely unprotected in his domestic relations.
10. The laws greatly obstruct the manumission of slaves,
even where the master is willing to enfranchise them.
11. The operation of the laws tends to deprive slaves
of religious instruction and consolation.
12. The whole power of the laws is exerted
to keep slaves in a state of the lowest ignorance.
13. There is in this country
a monstrous inequality of law and right.
What is a trifling fault in the white man,
is considered highly criminal in the slave;
the same offences which cost
a white man a few dollars only,
are punished in the negro with death.
14. The laws operate most oppressively
upon free people of color.30
The third chapter compares free labor to slave labor and calls for immediate emancipation, integration, and equality for African Americans. She explained how to move from slavery to freedom safely, and she objected to laws that make marriages between people of different colors illegal. The fourth chapter analyzes the politics of slavery and how the South has gained dominance in order to protect and extend slavery which will lead to wars of conquest in Texas and elsewhere.
Chapter 5 contrasts the weakness and failure of the Colonization Society to the moral power of the Anti-Slavery Societies. Two chapters describe the intellect and moral character of Negroes, and she described the examples of Job Ben Solomon, Antonio Perrura Reboucas, Antony William Amo, Lislet Geoffrroy, James Derham, Thomas Fuller, Olandad Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, Francis Williams, Phyllis Wheatly, and Toussaint L’Ouverture.
The last chapter condemns racial prejudice in the North as well and shows how it violates republican principles. She observed that people say negroes must be slaves because of their ignorance, but they insist on keeping them ignorant. She described the duties needed to solve this immense ethical problem. Child realized that she would face ridicule especially for favoring inter-racial marriages, but she wrote, “I have lived too long, and observed too much, to be disturbed by the world’s mockery.”31 She ended her Appeal by recognizing she would be “displeasing all classes;” but she felt she had to fulfill her task, and she concluded, “Worldly considerations should never stifle the voice of conscience.” She joined the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society in January 1834, and subscription cancellations led her to stop publication of the Juvenile Miscellany in May.
David Child published a militant tract against slavery, The Despotism of Freedom, but most reviewers preferred her Appeal. His debts from his libel suits surpassed $15,000. He contributed three articles to Lydia’s anti-slavery gift book, The Oasis which was published with pictures in October 1834. The oasis represents abolition in the desert of slavery, and she included poetry by John Greenleaf Whittier, his sister Elizabeth, and Hannah Flagg Gould. Lydia’s story, “Malem-Boo, The Brazilian Slave” was well illustrated. African Malem-Boo offers gold to save his step-son Yazoo, but he too is stolen with the gold. The horrible middle-passage is described. Malem-Boo is sold separately from Yazoo and refuses to work despite torture until his fourth master agrees he can earn his freedom.
David provided a legal argument to ban the slave trade by showing that the US Constitution’s interstate commerce clause gives the federal government jurisdiction. He was sued again for libel for sworn affidavits he had appended to The Despotism of Freedom. In 1834 he supported the Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire that would admit colored youth. On 31 July 1835 a town meeting voted to remove the school for blacks and whites, and in August about 400 men using 100 oxen tore down the Noyes Academy building. David Child defended the colored crew of the Spanish schooner Panda and lost the case; but in February 1835 he sent Lydia to Washington to plead with Attorney General Benjamin Butler and President Jackson to stay the execution. David had been elected vice president of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in January, and Garrison supported him for the US Senate; but an abolitionist had little chance at this time.
In May 1835 Lydia Maria Child published in two volumes a multi-cultural examination of women entitled History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations, and it had six printings. She was influenced by William Alexander’s 1779 History of Women and did extensive research. From Asia, Africa, and the Pacific Islands to Europe and America, she showed how marriage laws treated women as drudges, sexual objects, child-bearers and childrearers, or property. She discussed how laws differed on virginity, adultery, polygamy, divorce, concubinage, and prostitution, noting how women were treated differently than men in these and in relation to education, political power, business, and religion. Yet Maria Chapman, the Grimkés, the Westons, and Abbey Kelley became more militant feminists than Lydia. She noted that the Cherokees and Choctaws had
regularly-organized, systematic government,
in the democratic form, and a printed constitution.
The right of trial by jury,
and other principles of a free government,
are established on a permanent basis.
They have good farms, cotton-gins,
saw-mills, schools, and churches.32
Her Ladies’ Family Library included her Biographies of Madame de Staël and Madame Roland, Good Wives, and the 2-volume History of the Condition of Women.
On August 1 the Childs helped the English anti-slavery lecturer George Thompson escape a mob by taking him with them to New York. They were going to accompany him to England, but David was arrested for debt on the pier. Maria Chapman gave Lydia $100, hoping to get the Boston Athenaeum to restore Lydia’s use of their library to no avail. They boarded with Quaker farmers, and she met the Grimké sisters at the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in the fall. Abolitionist Benjamin Lundy persuaded David Child to join his free-labor community in Mexico.
Even William Ellery Channing opposed abolitionist agitation until Lydia sent him a copy of her Appeal which led him to write his book Slavery in 1835. She continued to influence Channing, and in 1836 he would put his name at the top of the “Boston Petition for the abolition of slavery in District of Columbia.”
Lydia put out three more abolitionist tracts: Authentic Anecdotes of American Slavery in 1835 and in January 1836 The Evils of Slavery and the Cure of Slavery and an Anti-Slavery Catechism which answered questions about how the abolition of slavery could occur. In May the pro-slavery Texans forced Lundy to cancel the colony in Mexico, and the Childs moved in with his parents; but Lydia soon left to live with her father. In August she provided legal evidence that enabled Ellis Loring to free the slave-child Med. Thompson in May invited the Childs to reside in England, but David made financial demands. David owed money to his law partner, and in October he went to Europe to study growing beets for sugar production.
In September 1836 Lydia published the novel Philothea: A Romance which reflected the difficulties in her own marriage. Set at Athens in the time of Pericles, the Ethiopian Tithonous represents African wisdom; the humble philosopher Anaxagorous and his granddaughter Philothea are like the Childs; Aspasia experiences the compromises of fame, and Philothea self-sacrifice. The philosopher Plato says,
The soul, in its present condition is an exile
from the orb of light; its ignorance is forgetfulness;
and whatever we can perceive of truth,
or imagine of beauty, is but a reminiscence
of our former more glorious state of being.
He who reverences the gods,
and subdues his own passions,
returns at last to the blest condition from which he fell.33
Lydia represented the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society at the four-day Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in May 1837, but the issues of racial prejudice, women’s rights, and religious sectarianism were divisive. Child moved that they meet annually, and they agreed; but she did not attend anymore conventions.
After studying medicine and submitting her work to physicians, Child published The Family Nurse with home remedies in 1837, but it did not sell well during the financial panic. As David’s efforts with sugar beets were falling apart from failed financial backing, the Childs moved to Northampton to grow beets in May 1838. That month the New England Anti-Slavery Society voted to allow women to participate. They gathered signatures on petitions against the annexation of Texas and to end slavery in the District of Columbia, but trying to reform Massachusetts marriage laws on race had no chance. Lydia realized that overcoming racial prejudice would not occur until “long after emancipation.” She attended Emerson’s lectures in Cambridge. She supported the Garrisonians at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention on 28 May 1839 and was named to the business committee along with Maria Weston Chapman. Lydia tried to keep the divided Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society together by calling a special meeting. On the issue of women’s rights she maintained the freedom of her soul and conscience. She attended Margaret Fuller’s Conversations and Emerson’s lectures.
The American Anti-Slavery Society in New York founded the National Anti-Slavery Standard in 1840, and the Childs were paid $1,000 a year to be its editors. LMC was editor, and DLC was assistant editor. In May 1841 Lydia moved to New York and took over the paper. She boarded with the Quaker family of Isaac Hopper and spent time with his 26-year-old son John in New York. She interpreted the schism by Swedenborg’s concepts of conservatives who want to “stop there” and reformers who want to “go ahead.” In regard to slave revolts she agreed with Garrison on nonresistance instead of violence. David had defended Nat Turner’s rebellion and focused on politics. The Standard had about 16,000 readers, and in her two years as editor the number of subscribers doubled to 5,000. They reprinted writing by Dickens, De Tocqueville, Emerson, and Hawthorne. Her “Letters from New York” column was most popular as she addressed readers as “you” and encouraged them to write to her. She covered urban poverty, prison reform, women’s rights, the death penalty, religious toleration, and justice for ethnic minorities, and her editorials went beyond slavery to discuss Mormons, Transcendentalists, socialism, and homeopathy. Henrietta Sargent reported on the speaking debut of Frederick Douglass at Nantucket in August, and they reprinted his speeches and an article from the Northern Star and Freeman’s Advocate in April 1842.
In February 1842 Lydia Child supported the Garrisonian effort to repeal the Union because “there was no other way for the free States to clear themselves of being accomplices in tremendous guilt.”34 In another editorial on March 31 she argued,
1. The Union is coercion and is the “Disunited States.”
2. The Union does not have “free institutions.”
3. Free states have collaborated in perpetuating slavery.
4. Slavery is kept by mob violence, censorship and war.
Yet she objected to Garrison making disunion the main topic at the annual meeting, and she sent a circular to New York newspapers. In July she published a dialog as “Talk about Political Party” in the National Anti-Slavery Standard. The object of the Anti-Slavery Society was to change public opinion on slavery by uttering the truth. Garrisonians and Lydia dealt with abolitionism as moral reform instead of as a political movement. She wanted to work through the political parties rather than with them or the new Liberty Party. She believed that trying to impose abolition on the South against their will would be counterproductive. She urged the blacks to be “manly, firm, and uncompromising, without being violent” in order to win over popular opinion. She also wrote for The Liberty Bell the following anti-slavery stories: “The Black Saxons” in 1841, “The Quadroons” in 1842, and “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes” in 1843.
In February 1843 Lydia finally separated her finances from her husband David and decided to stay in New York. Ellis Loring helped her legally deal with New York’s property laws. After much dissension she resigned as editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard in May. David became the editor in August. She disliked the fighting of sects and attacks to keep new recruits from joining the adversary. She argued that sectarianism impedes the progress of reform and restricts the free expression of opinions.
Many of her “Letters from New York” discussed prison reform and capitalism, and the Boston Courier began running her column in December. In #29 in October 1842 she wrote, “The God within us is the God we really believe in.”35 and
If we can abolish poverty, we shall have taken
the greatest step towards the abolition of crime;
and this will be the final triumph of the gospel of Christ.36
She had 1,500 copies of Letters from New York printed in late August; they were sold out by December, and it would have eleven printings in seven years.
In 1844 Lydia published her 2-volume Flowers for Children. Margaret Fuller moved to New York in December, and she and Lydia renewed their close friendship. They associated with talented people such as Edgar Allan Poe and James Russell Lowell.
Women were active in the abolitionist movement. When they were not allowed to join the American Anti-Slavery Society at its founding in 1833, they formed the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and in New York four years later the National Female Anti-Slavery Society. When a mob of several thousand abducted Garrison while he was speaking to their Boston meeting in 1835, Maria Weston Chapman led the women out walking in pairs holding the hand of a colored sister.
Quaker Prudence Crandall began accepting Negroes to her girls school in April 1833, and she taught seventeen Negro girls for eighteen months despite persecution and harassment that included her arrest in July. Arthur Tappan spent $10,000 on her lawyers and an appeal to the state’s Supreme Court that overturned her conviction in July 1834. Angry residents tried to burn down the school, and vandals broke ninety windows of the Academy on September 9. The next day Crandall closed the school to protect the students and her family.
Lucretia Mott was born on 3 January 1793. She went to Quaker schools for girls and read the sermons of William Ellery Channing for their humanitarian concerns. She married James Mott and became the mother of six. She read the works of William Penn and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Lucretia was ordained as a minister by her Quaker meeting when she was 28. She was influenced by Edward Hicks who recognized only the authority of the inner Light and became an abolitionist. Lucretia criticized conservative attitudes in the Religious Society of Friends, and she defended the liberals whom Quakers disowned for attending the lectures of Fanny Wright. Lucretia met William Lloyd Garrison at her home in August 1830, and she advocated not using the products of slavery. When Garrison organized the all-male American Antislavery Society in Philadelphia in December 1833, Lucretia organized the Philadelphia Female Antislavery Society four days later. Angelina and Sarah Grimke joined; as they began to address “mixed” audiences, the “woman question” arose.
Women began getting petitions signed to stop the spread of slavery, to ban it in the District of Columbia and in interstate trade as well as for its complete abolition. When their right to petition was challenged, ex-President John Quincy Adams presented the petitions himself in the United States Congress.
The Grimké sisters, Sarah (1792-1873) and Angelina (1805-1879), left their South Carolina home and its slaves in 1828, joined the Quakers in Philadelphia, and worked for the abolition of slavery and women’s rights. In 1835 Angelina wrote a letter to William Lloyd Garrison, and he published it in The Liberator. Quakers objected to Sarah talking about the abolition of slavery at a meeting in 1836. That year the Grimkés joined the American Anti-Slavery Society, and both sisters went on lecture tours.
Sarah Grimké believed that men and women were created equal and argued that whatever is morally right for a man to do is right for a woman. She explained what happened.
She has surrendered her dearest RIGHTS,
and been satisfied with the privileges
which man has assumed to grant her;
she has been amused with the show of power,
whilst man has absorbed all the reality into himself.37
Sarah noted the disproportionate value set on the time and labor of men as compared to that of women. Men have exerted brutal power over women, such that in most countries the name husband means also tyrant. Brute force is especially egregious in the homes of the poor, where the woman is made a drudge. Sarah signed her letters “Thine in the bonds of womanhood.”
On 21 February 1838 Angelina Grimké addressed a committee of the Massachusetts Legislature and said,
I stand before you as a citizen,
on behalf of the 20,000 women of Massachusetts
whose names are enrolled on petitions
which have been submitted to the Legislature….
These petitions related to the great
and solemn subject of slavery….
And because it is a political subject,
it has often tauntingly been said,
that women had nothing to do with it.
Are we aliens, because we are women?
Are we bereft of citizenship because we are mothers,
wives and daughters of a mighty people?
Have women no country—
no interests staked in public weal—
no liabilities in common peril—
no partnership in a nation’s guilt and shame?38
In 1837 Sarah Grimké while on her lecture tour wrote Letters on the Equality of the Sexes which was published in 1838 in the New England Spectator and reprinted in The Liberator. She speculated that women were the first to suffer from man’s lust for dominion after the fall. She wrote,
All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will,
used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification,
to minister to his sensual pleasures,
to be instrumental in promoting his comfort;
but never has he desired to elevate her
to the rank she was created to fill.
He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind;
and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought,
and says the being he has thus deeply injured
is his inferior.38
Angelina Grimké published the pamphlet An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States in 1837. In 1838 she married Theodore Weld (1803-95). He had attended Lane Seminary and in 1834 led 75 students who left because they clashed with Lane president Lyman Beecher in their efforts to free slaves. Then Weld began working as an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Angelina helped him collect materials from southern newspapers and to write and publish his influential book, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses.
Angelina Grimké went on a speaking tour and drew large audiences of more than a thousand people. She argued that men would find women as their equal much more valuable than women as their inferior. She worked herself to exhaustion, collapsed, and nearly died of typhoid fever. Angelina was reported to have said,
I ask no favors for my sex.
I surrender not our claim to equality.
All I ask of our brethren is
that they will take their feet from off our necks,
and permit us to stand upright on the ground
which God has designed us to occupy.40
Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hall was dedicated on 14 May 1838, and the next day the First Annual Convention of Antislavery Women began there. Each night the crowd of protesters outside grew. Many were angry that black and white women were meeting together before a “promiscuous” audience of men and women. Garrison spoke first, and the mob broke into the hall; but Maria Weston Chapman helped restore order. Angelina Grimké and Lucretia Mott spoke, and Abby Kelly gave her maiden speech that led to her becoming an anti-slavery lecturer. On May 16 notices posted urged people to “interfere, forcefully if they must.” On the 17th a delegation asked the mayor for protection, but he told them not to let black women attend. While 17,000 people gathered in the street that night, Angelina Grimké said,
What if the mob should now burst in upon us,
break up our meeting
and commit violence upon our persons—
would this be any thing
compared with what the slaves endure?41
The mayor got the key to the hall and locked it. He told the crowd to be peaceful because the convention was stopped. Then he went home. Lucretia Mott had led the evacuation of the hall, suggesting that the women link arms in pairs of one white woman and one black woman. She calmly awaited the mob at her home with her husband and their guests. The mob broke into the unguarded building, gathered books, and set them on fire. From there the mob went to attack the Motts’ home, but someone led them in the wrong direction.
The next day the women met again at Sarah Pugh’s small schoolhouse and decided to increase their efforts to make more black friends. At the following year’s convention Lucretia Mott refused police protection and ignored advice to keep the races apart on the streets. A few months later her bravery prevented an abolitionist friend from being tarred and feathered in Delaware. She boldly pleaded with them to take her as she was the chief offender, saying, “I ask no courtesy at your hands on account of my sex.”42
The men’s and women’s anti-slavery societies merged in 1839. Philadelphia women began helping black people, and Lucretia Mott preached often in black churches in 1840. That June she and James Mott attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Even though she represented two organizations, she had to sit in the back “behind the bar.” Young Wendell Phillips urged that the women be admitted. He lost the vote, though young Elizabeth Cady Stanton persuaded her husband. When Garrison arrived, he sat behind the bar with the women. The Motts visited Ireland and Scotland where Lucretia gave a sermon on the rights of women. They returned to London, and Lucretia answered the questions of Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the British Museum. When eight American women delegates were barred from the British Anti-Slavery Societies meeting in London, Lucretia and Elizabeth decided to organize a convention in the United States for the rights of women. In January 1843 Lucretia Mott preached in a Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, and more than 40 Congressmen attended. Ralph Waldo Emerson was impressed and later visited the Motts in Philadelphia.
Sarah Margaret Fuller was born on 23 May 1810 in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. Her father Timothy tutored her and pressured her to develop her intellect, keeping her up so late at night that she suffered from “spectral illusions, nightmare, and somnambulism.” During the day her mother taught her household duties and how to sew. She liked reading Plutarch’s Lives, Cervantes and Molière. She read Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet even after her father told her to put it down. Her father was elected to the US House of Representatives, and from 1817 for eight years he spent about five months each year in Washington. He wrote to her often, sometimes twice a day, sending her instructions and demanding answers to his questions.
Margaret at home studied the classics and learned modern languages. In 1818 she met Ellen Kilshaw, her “first friend,” and she wrote about it in her “Autobiographical Romance.” In the fall of 1819 she studied Latin and Greek at a private school that accepted girls part-time. In 1821 she walked six miles to and from a school for “Young Ladies.” She was sent to live with her Aunt Martha in Boston while her parents spent the winter in Washington. She strained her eyes reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations eight hours a day. During the difficult year 1823 Margaret became friends with Frederic Henry Hedge who knew German literature and philosophy. Her parents moved to Groton, and she attended a Young Ladies’ Seminary there. Her father retired from the US Congress, but in 1824 he wrote a pamphlet to help John Quincy Adams get elected President. In 1825 the Fullers returned to Boston, and Timothy Fuller then served in the Massachusetts legislature. Margaret read the Italian poetry of Dante, Petrarca, Tasso, and Vittorio Alfieri, the French novels and Confessions of Rousseau, and she delighted in Voltaire.
Fuller began reading Madame de Staël and Locke’s philosophy, and she met Lydia Francis (later Child) who shared those interests. Her father wanted to write a history of the United States, and he and Margaret read the life and letters of Thomas Jefferson. She was attracted to George Davis, but he betrayed her trust. She suffered disappointment in 1830 but wrote to her friend James Freeman Clarke, “I believe in Eternal Progression. I believe in a God, a Beauty and Perfection.”43
She read the works of Goethe and Schiller. Influenced by Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret began giving private lessons. After reading an article by the historian George Bancroft in the November 1834 North American Review, she wrote about the founder of the Roman Republic, “In Defense of Brutus,” which was printed in the Daily Advertiser & Patriot. She wrote articles on Hannah More and others which were rejected as was her translation of Goethe’s drama, Torquato Tasso, which she got Hedges to deliver to Emerson.
After being moved by a sermon on Thanksgiving Day in 1831, Margaret went to a dark pool in the woods and had a mystical experience. In 1840 after having read Emerson’s Nature, she described it, writing:
I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly,
and the result of circumstance;
that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered;
that I had only to live in the idea of the All,
and all was mine.
This truth came to me, and I received it unhesitatingly;
so that I was for that hour taken up into God.44
Fuller is perhaps most famous for saying, “I accept the Universe”—at which Carlyle reportedly remarked “Gad, she’d better!”45
Fuller and Clarke learned about Goethe from reading Carlyle. She taught herself German and spent the next three years reading German books by Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Tieck, and Johann Paul Richter. In 1833 her friend Hedge published an essay on Coleridge that influenced Emerson. Her father saved money by having his oldest child Margaret teach her sister and five brothers. In 1835 she wrote again about the ideal of the soul accepting life as the true Stoicism. After Goethe died in 1832, she wanted to go to Europe and write a biography of him. She became friends with the visiting English writer Harriet Martineau who had paid to publish her own rejected Illustrations on Political Economy which was soon successful.
In 1835 her friend James Freeman Clarke became the editor of the Western Messenger which would publish seven of Fuller’s articles and reviews. When she reviewed Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii in the August issue, she also noted how his works moved from satire toward ideals. After she published an anonymous satire of Davis, her authorship was exposed. She became so ill with typhoid fever in September that she nearly died. Her father died of cholera in October, and she suffered from headaches for the rest of her life. In 1836 she taught at Bronson Alcott’s Temple School in Boston, and she visited the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson from July 21 to August 11. She told him about German, French, and Italian literature, and he called her the best read person in New England. She benefited from living in Boston for four months and became a member of the Transcendentalist Club that met in Emerson’s home.
Fuller started a private school to teach ladies German, Italian, and French literature, and 20 students paid $15 each for a quarter. The schoolmaster Bronson Alcott hired Fuller to teach in his school in December, but he did not pay her salary. He published Conversations with Children on the Gospels which got bad reviews and affected his school. She visited Emerson on her way home to Groton. In April 1837 she became the head teacher at the Green Street School in Providence, Rhode Island and was paid $1,000 a year. She encouraged the sixty students to “search after the good and the beautiful.”
In February 1836 she spent a week organizing more than a thousand of her father’s letters. She translated Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life, and George Ripley published her 412-page version in May 1839. She agreed with Goethe that to do anything great one must, like the Greeks, be so highly cultivated in order to “know how to raise up the realities of nature to the height” of one’s own mind. In April she joined her mother and her family at Jamaica Plain near Boston. There Margaret read novels by Balzac and George Sand. She wrote in her Journal,
All for love and the world well lost.
That sounds so true.
But Genius when it sells itself gives up
not only the world but the universe.
Yet does not Love comprehend the universe?
The universe is Love:
Why should I weary my eye with scanning the parts,
when I can clasp the whole
this moment to my beating heart?
But if the intellect be repressed,
the idea will never be brought out from the feeling.46
About this time she arrogantly claimed, “I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.”47 Her friendship with Anna Barker led Fuller to say,
It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman
and a man with a man.
It is so pleasant to be sure of it because undoubtedly
it is the same love that we shall feel when we are angels.48
In October 1842 she also wrote on such friendships in her Journal,
It is regulated by the same law
as that of love between persons of different sexes,
only it is purely intellectual and spiritual,
unprofaned by any mixture of lower instincts,
undisturbed by any need of consulting temporal interests;
its law is the desire of the spirit to realize a whole which
makes it seek in another being for what it finds not in itself.
Thus the beautiful seeks the strong,
and the strong the beautiful.49
In November 1839 Fuller began giving weekly Conversations for women at a home arranged by three Peabody sisters in Boston on Saturday mornings. She announced the topics ahead but used no notes. She urged the ladies to share their doubts and difficulties in order to learn from the experiences of each other. They questioned and examined and followed leadings and thoughts instead of opinions. Her purpose was to review and systematize thought and knowledge with precision and then find the pursuits that build up the life of thought and action. The first series was on Greek mythology. After that they met at Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore in Boston. There were two series each year, and they went on for four years. Other topics were “Fine Arts,” “Culture,” “Ignorance,” “Vanity,” “Ethics,” “Prudence,” “Patience,” and “Health.” Her favorite topic “Greek Mythology” was repeated to discuss will, reason, love, and beauty.
In 1841 a Monday series that was open to men intimidated the women and was not continued. About 25 women attended, and they included Fuller’s friends Lydia Maria Child and Caroline Sturgis, and the wives of Emerson, George Ripley, George Bancroft, Theodore Parker, and Horace Greeley. All the women were white Protestants, and most came from wealthy families. Elizabeth Peabody recorded that Fuller said, “The attainment of a divine nature was the faith that reconciled her to this human nature as the pedestal of that divine nature.”50 For income Fuller taught private pupils who sometimes boarded with her.
In October 1839 the Transcendentalists Emerson and Fuller decided to publish a magazine, and Ripley agreed to be the business manager. Alcott compared the soul’s marking the movements of the universal spirit to a sundial, and they accepted the name, The Dial. Fuller agreed to be editor. She was to be paid $200 a year; but with many of its articles and poems reprinted in Greeley’s Daily Tribune, there were no profits to pay her. The first issue came out in July 1840 and included her “Short Essay on Critics” which suggested that critics can analyze the genius of poets, interpret invention, and help people appreciate beauty. She believed that the industrial growth of the country had caused a commercial and political fever and that education had become vulgar, caring for making a living rather than living mentally and morally. The first issue was criticized for the “Orphic Sayings” by Bronson Alcott. Fuller edited Emerson’s “Thoughts on Modern Literature” for the second issue. Ripley resigned because he wanted to found a commune.
In August in a stagecoach taking Fuller home to Jamaica Plain she criticized Emerson for spiritual inhospitality, but he said he would keep his doors open to her sunshine. She previously had fallen in love with Samuel Gray Ward, but on 3 October 1840 she attended his wedding to her close friend, Anna Barker. On the 16th Fuller attended a meeting at Emerson’s home where Ripley presented his plan to them and Alcott for a commune that would become Brook Farm. The experimental community began in April 1841. Fuller would visit about once a month. She met Nathaniel Hawthorne there in August 1842, and that year she reviewed his Twice-Told Tales.
In April 1841 The Dial’s publisher, Weeks and Jordan, went bankrupt. Unpaid Fuller wrote “Lives of the Great Composers: Haydn, Mozart, Handel, Bach, Beethoven” in the October issue and then returned to Emerson’s home. She resigned as editor in March 1842 but continued to contribute articles. Emerson became editor and paid for the last few issues before the end in April 1844.
In the July 1843 issue of The Dial Fuller published “The Great Lawsuit: Man vs. Men. Woman vs. Women.” Fuller would expand this into Woman in the Nineteenth Century. She started with the fundamental principle that all souls are equal, and she applied it to Africans, American Indians, and women. She called for institutions of higher learning for women taught by women. She demanded complete equality for women in education, industry, and politics, and she suggested that such equality would allow a divine energy to pervade nature previously unknown in history. Humanity will be ripe for this when the inward and outward freedom for women is recognized as a right, not merely yielded as a concession. Having discovered her own androgynous nature, she asserted, “There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman,” and she noted Apollo as the feminine man and Minerva (Athena) as the masculine woman. Carl Jung would confirm this psychological concept with the anima in the male unconscious and the animus in the female. Fuller saw male and female as complementary in nature, representing two sides of a “radical dualism” with masculine energy, power, and intellect being balanced by feminine harmony, beauty, and love. She believed that women excelled in spiritual intuition. If men would just remove the barriers, women could be independent and self-reliant. She wrote,
We would have every path laid open
to woman as freely as to man.
Were this done, and a slight temporary fermentation
allowed to subside, we believe that the Divine would ascend
into nature to a height unknown in the history of past ages,
and nature, thus instructed,
would regulate the spheres not only so as to avoid collision,
but to bring forth ravishing harmony.51
Fuller published “The Magnolia of Lake Ponchartrain” in January 1841, followed by “Leila” in July, and her essay “Goethe” in September. In November the Conversation topic was “Ethics.” In the summer of 1842 she wrote “A Credo” which included:
God we say is Love, if we believe this we must trust him.
Whatever has been permitted by the law of being
must be for good, and only in time not good.
We do trust him and are led forward by experience.
Light gives experience of outward life, faith of inward.
We then discern however faintly
the necessary harmony of the true lives.
The moment we have broken through an obstruction,
not accidentally but by the aid of Faith
we begin to realize why any was permitted.
We begin to interpret the Universe
and deeper depths are opened
with each soul that is convinced.52
In the summer of 1843 Fuller traveled with her friend Sarah Clarke to the Great Lakes region, and she would write about it in her 1844 book, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. In the last part she discussed her experience with the Chippewa and Ottawa tribes. She recalled a deputation of Sacs and Foxes who had visited Boston in 1837, and that November she had written the poem “Governor Everett Receiving the Indian Chiefs” which includes the following verse:
We take our turn, and the Philosopher
Sees through the clouds a hand which cannot err,
An unimproving race, with all their graces
And all their vices, must resign their places;
And Human Culture rolls its onward flood
Over the broad plains steeped in Indian blood.53
She also wrote,
I have not wished to write sentimentally about the Indians,
however moved by the thought
of their wrongs and speedy extinction.
I know that Europeans who took possession of this country,
felt themselves justified
by their superior civilization and religious ideas.
Had they been truly civilized and Christianized,
the conflicts which sprang from the collision
of the two races, might have been avoided;
but this cannot be expected
in movements made by masses of men.
The mass has never yet been humanized,
though the age may develop a human thought.54
In August 1844 Horace Greeley asked Fuller to be the literary critic of his Tribune. She completed Woman in the Nineteenth Century in November, and Greeley would publish it in February 1845. She began writing for the New York Tribune in December 1844.
1. Society in America by Harriet Martineau ed. Seymour Martin Lipset, p. 94.
2. Ibid., p. 96.
3. Ibid., p. 124.
4. Ibid., p. 125.
5. Ibid., p. 214-215.
6. Ibid., p. 221, 223.
7. The Annals of America, Volume 5, p. 308, 309-310.
8. Educated Women in America: Selected Writings of Catharine Beecher, Margaret Fuller, and M. Carey Thomas, p. 67-68.
9. Ibid., p. 71.
10. Frances Wright Free Enquirer: The Study of a Temperament by A. J. G. Perkins and Theresa Wolfson, p. 25.
11. Ibid., p. 43.
12. Reason, Religion, and Morals by Frances Wright, p. 29.
13. Ibid., p. 40.
14. Ibid., p. 77.
15. Ibid., p. 79-80.
16. Ibid., p. 150, 151.
17. Ibid., p. 183.
18. Ibid.,p. 212-213.
19. Frances Wright Free Enquirer: The Study of a Temperament by A. J. G. Perkins and Theresa Wolfson, p. 238.
20. Reason, Religion, and Morals by Frances Wright,p. 270.
21. Stranger and Traveler: The Story of Dorothea Dix, American Reformer by Dorothy Clarke Wilson, p. 69.
22. Ibid., p. 112.
23. Massachusetts Memorial by Dix, p. 29 quoted in Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix by David Gollaher, p. 145.
24. “Value of Time” in Juvenile Miscellany March 1827 quoted in The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child by Carolyn L. Karcher, Volume 1, p. 69.
25. Quoted in A Lydia Maria Child Reader, p. 28.
26. The First Settlers by Lydia Maria Child, p. 13 quoted by Karcher on p. 93.
27. The American Frugal Housewife by Lydia Maria Child, p. 3.
28. Ibid., p. 87.
29. The Mother’s Book by Lydia Maria Child, p. 23.
30. An Appeal in Favor of Americans Called Africans by Lydia Maria Child, p. 41-42.
31. Quoted in A Lydia Maria Child Reader, p. 189.
32. Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians by Lydia Maria Child, p. 186.
33. Philothea: A Romance by Lydia Maria Child, p. 50.
34.Quoted in A Lydia Maria Child Reader, p. 283.
35. Ibid., p. 307.
36. A Lydia Maria Child Reader, p. 322.
37. Letters on the Equality of the Sexes quoted in Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, p. 41.
38. Quoted in The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina by Gerda Lerner, p. 7.
39. Letters on the Equality of the Sexes quoted in Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, p. 38.
40. The Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women by Sarah Grimké, p. 10 quoted in Century of Struggle by Eleanor Flexner, p. 47.
41. Voices of a People’s History of the United States, p. 118.
42. Valiant Friend: The Life of Lucretia Mott by Margaret Hope Bacon, p. 84.
43. Quoted in The Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson, p. 77.
44. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli ed. Ralph Waldo Emerson et al, p. 141 and The Essential Margaret Fuller, p. 11.
45. Quoted in The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, p. 41.
46. The Essential Margaret Fuller, p. 6.
47. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, I, 234 quoted in The Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson, p. 149.
48. The Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson, p. 154.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., p. 164.
51. “The Great Lawsuit” by Margaret Fuller, 14 quoted in Matteson, p. 210.
52. The Essential Margaret Fuller, p. 22.
53. Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 by Margaret Fuller, p. 188.
54. Ibid., p. 234.