An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called "Lady Scribblers"

The four modern biographies of the baker’s daughter who became the author, editor, and reformer William Lloyd Garrison called “the first woman in the republic” have so differed in their portrayal and interpretation of Lydia Maria Francis Child that they might almost be read collectively as the record of a woman suffering from multiple personalities. More correctly, their disparate delineations support at least one hypothesis that underlies recent theories of literary criticism and, to a lesser extent, intellectual history. In their overlapping readings of the manuscripts and printed texts available to all, Child’s biographers seemingly validate the contention that meaning is derived from the reader’s response rather than the writer’s intent. Without doubt the questions Child’s biographers asked of the same data have, at least in part, been shaped by their intellectual milieu, whether the civil rights movement that followed the 1954 Brown decision or the new feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. The troubling question, of course, is how fully and accurately the distinctive Maria Childs portrayed in 1964, 1965, 1992, and 1994 resemble the gifted writer and ardent abolitionist who lived from 1802 until 1880 and spoke against the racism and gender inequality of her own times.

Milton Meltzer’s Tongue of Flame: The Life of Lydia Maria Child (1965) is a simple, straightforward tale of a dedicated mild-mannered, and unconflicted abolitionist. For him, Child’s significant career began in 1833, although her Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, published that year, unquestionably scotched the popularity she had achieved in the preceding decade as a novelist, editor of America’s first children’s magazine, and author of domestic handbooks. As early converts to antislavery radicalism, she and her equally committed but ruinously impractical husband then sacrificed physical and financial comfort to further the cause. When David’s forlorn attempt to produce free-labor beet sugar in western Massachusetts multiplied the massive debts he had already accumulated from the unsuccessful newspapers he edited and published, the libel suits his editorials provoked, and a law practice devoid of paying clients, Maria went off to live alone in New York, where she edited the National Anti-Slavery Standard from 1841 to 1843. “True, she had yearned to escape from the dreary Northampton farm, [where she had been reduced to domestic drudgery,] but not without David” (p. 82). Nonetheless, she bore up in her loneliness, reshaped the Standard ‘s formerly combative editorial style, doubled its readership, and wrote her sociologically perceptive “Letters from New York,” which, published as a book in 1843, restored her literary popularity and financial solvency. But when that same year David gave up farming and resumed newspaper work, Maria, taking advantage of New York law, separated her finances from his. “She loved David none the less for this” (p. 113), albeit the couple continued to live apart.

Helene G. Baer’s The Heart Is Like Heaven: The Life of Lydia Maria Child, published a year before Meltzer’s biography, described the first two years of the Childs’ ten-year separation as a sharp break in which Maria distanced herself not just from David’s finances but from his life and person. Boarding in the home of the Quaker abolitionist Isaac Hopper, this thirty-nine-year-old woman formed an intense relationship with Hopper’s twenty-six-year-old son John. With the lively companionship of an already financially successful young man whom she called her adopted son, she prowled the high places and back streets of New York, enjoying the thrills of opera and art galleries and accumulating evidence for her Letters from New York. Here “she dreamed of stars and love” but experienced a “chill of mood” as David, his debts, and his wretched beet farm continued to drain her energy and leave her strapped for funds (p. 146).

Almost thirty years after Baer and...