A Pioneer Woman of American Letters and Social Reform—Lydia Maria Child

                                Lydia Maria Child as a young writer.

Lydia Maria Child died in her Wayland, Massachusetts home at age 78 on October 20, 1880.  Chances are you never heard of her.  But she may have been the first American woman to earn her living as a professional writer and became one of the country’s leading social reform advocates.  If you remember her at all, it is probably because she penned a classic holiday song still sung by school children.

Child was born on February 11, 1802 in Medford, Massachusetts.  Her father Convers Francis was a businessman, banker, and a stern orthodox Calvinist.  The youngest of three children, she received a conventional education at a local dame school and a female academy.  She was especially close to her oldest brother, Convers Jr. who encouraged her inquisitive mind and guided her reading.  She was bereft when he left home to attend Harvard when she was 9.

When her mother died, her father sent her to live with a recently married older sister in Maine where she was expected to act as a housekeeper and eventually a nurse for the children.  The curious Maria continued reading and when time allowed explored the area.  A visit to the nearby Penobscot settlement began a lifelong interest in and respect of Native Americans.

In 1819 young Maria took a teaching position in Gardiner, Maine.  She dabbled in mystic Swedenborgism but wrote her brother that “I am more in danger of wrecking on the rocks of skepticism than of standing on the shoals of fanaticism. I am apt to regard a system of religion as I do any other beautiful theory…”

Maria returned to Massachusetts in 1821 a dutifully took communion and became a member of the First Parish in Medford.  But she soon moved in with her brother Covers, now a Unitarian minister at First Parish in Watertown and attended his church regularly.  He encouraged her reading and gave her a magazine article that suggested that New England history might be fertile ground for an aspiring novelist. 

With Convers’ encouragement she dashed off her first novel Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times which was published in 1824 and is credited with being the one of first historical novels published in the United States coming out just months after James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, first of the Leatherstocking series.  Like Cooper’s book, it was also noted for its sympathetic portrayal of Native Americans.  From that time forward he dedicated herself to writing.

But it was not yet a profession that could support her.  The same year she opened her own school in Watertown and continued teach for the next four years.  In 1826 she founded Juvenile Miscellany, the first monthly periodical for children issued in the country.

Maria's husband David Lee Child, a reformer, journalist, and improvident businessman in mid life.  Their childless marriage and partnership endured despite often long separations as Maria pursued her career.

In 1826 Maria married Boston lawyer David Lee Child, an idealistic reformer who introduced her to the wide and tumultuous world of the Hub City’s intellectuals, activists, and especially radical abolitionists. 

Maria officially joined a conventional Congregational church but left it and began to attend worship with William Ellery Channing, although she despaired of his reluctance to fully embrace abolitionism.  She was soon a frequent participant in Margaret Fuller’s “conversations” held at Elizabeth Peabody’s North Street bookstore.  She became Fuller’s close friend and collaborator.

Despite her loving relationship with her husband, he was frequently drawn into improvident schemes or in trouble for his activism.  Twice he was jailed for debt.  The family had to rely largely on Maria’s earnings as a writer.  Inspired by her own experience she published The Frugal Housewife, a guide to making do with little.  It was a success and kept the family fed.

Child was a collaborator with fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison but broke with him after 11 years of close association in 1851 over his advocacy of violence and abstention from voting while slave states remained in the Union.  Although the events in Bloody Kansas and John Brown's Harper's Ferry Raid caused her to move toward approval of violence, the breach with Garrison was too raw and personal for her to resume that relationship.

In 1831 Maria became an associate of the nation’s most notorious abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison.  She became a leader of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and contributed to Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator.  Although an ardent supporter of women’s rights, she came to believe that the subjugation of women could not be ended until the still worse evil of slavery was ended.

From 1832 to ‘35 Child published five volumes of the Ladies Family Library featuring short biographies exemplifying feminine virtues for her growing audience of middle class women.  The books were popular and selling well until her unvarnished militancy was aired in her 1833 book An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans.  Her radicalism alienated much of her audience.  Sales of her books for women plummeted, as did circulation of her magazine, which she was forced to suspend in 1834.

Child's anti-slavery book caused many of the middle class women readers she had carefully cultivated to abandon her..

Defiant, Child turned her attention full time to the cause of abolitionism.  In 1839 she was elected to the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society.  The following year she was appointed editor of the Society’s influential publication, the National Anti-Slavery Standard and moved to New York City to assume her duties.  Her husband David, although nominally named her co-editor, remained in Massachusetts to work on a scheme to introduce sugar beet cultivation to the state to end dependence on slave harvested sugar cane.  Under New York law, Maria was able for the first time to separate her finances from those of her husband.

Her tenure at the Standard was a success and circulation grew with her policy of appealing to the whole family.  She continued her service on the board of American Anti-Slavery Society where she collaborated with Lucretia Mott and Maria Weston Chapman.  She wrote anti-slavery fiction as a way of broadening the appeal of the movement including the short stories The Quadroons in 1842 and Slavery’s Pleasant Homes: A Faithful Sketch 1843.

But in 1842 she broke with Garrison over his advocacy of refusing to vote as a protest against Union with slave holding states, his advocacy of violence, and organizational infighting.  She felt these positions would alienate her broadened readership base.  She resigned her editorship and turned her back for a while on the organized anti-slavery movement.  She vowed to work only with feminist and suffrage organizations.  

Child returned to her father's home in Wayland, Massachusetts which became her own home for most of the last 30 years of her life. 

Child remained in New York as a freelance writer for some time before returning to reunite with her husband.  Together they cared for her ailing father in Wayland.  The old house became her home for most of the rest of her life.

In the 1850’s escalating tensions over the Fugitive Slave Act and the attack on her personal friend Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate re-invigorated her opposition to slavery and caused her to re-evaluate her previous absolute opposition to violence.  Outrages like the murderous raid of pro-slavery forces on Lawrence Kansas caused her to become more sympathetic to violence.  Her poem The Kansas Emigrants drew widespread attention. 

She was sympathetic to John Brown after his arrest for trying to lead a slave insurrection with his raid at Harpers Ferry.  She personally knew some of the prominent Bostonians including Rev. Theodore Parker who had financed the raid.  Child wrote letters of in support of Brown to Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise and published the exchange which was widely praised in the North and condemned in the South.

During the same decade she turned her attention to religion.  She had long been a seeker and although most frequently worshiped with the Unitarians, she found their practice sometimes cold and unsatisfying.  She plunged into a study of both the evolution of Christianity and of world religion.  She published her three volume The Progress of Religious Ideas through Successive Ages in 1854.  She hoped to remove “the superstitious rubbish from the sublime morality of Christ.”  The closely researched books were respectful of the contributions of many religions to the development of a refined human morality.  The books were highly praised but sold poorly.  He close friend the Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson said of one volume that it was “too learned for a popular book and too popular for a learned one.”

As war clouds gathered, Child left Wayland for Boston where there was work that needed to be done in the winter of 1860-61.  She was back home when the war broke out and dedicated herself to charity work supporting contrabands—the slaves that fell into Union hands or escaped their masters by fleeing into the protection of the Army.  Concerned with their future, she edited the Freedmen’s Book, a reading primer for former slaves.

With the end of the war Child returned to earlier passions. The plight of Native Americans grabbed her attention and she authored a series of pamphlets on the issue.  Most influential was An Appeal for the Indians in 1868 which called upon government officials and religious leaders, to bring justice to the tribes, including the right to retain their lands, speak their languages, and practice their religions.  The pamphlet helped encourage the establishment of the Board of Indian Commissioners and the subsequent more slightly more lenient peace policy of the Ulysses S. Grant administration.

                              Child on the porch of her Wayland home in the post-Civil War era.

Child also resumed her work on behalf of women’s suffrage where she was a leader of a faction that demanded that free Black men get the vote first, or in conjunction with women.  She was a founder of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association.

In 1867 she was attracted to the Free Religious Association (FRA), a semi-impendent group of Unitarian ministers and congregations which were challenging the remnants of orthodoxy.  She attended worship at meetings on her frequent trips to Boston.  In 1878 she published Aspirations of the World, her own personal eclectic Bible made up of quotations culled from the religions of the world. 

Child’s husband David died in 1874.  Freed of his debts and schemes, she was for the first time in her life able to save money from her continuing active work as a popular writer.  She used her newfound wealth to give generously to causes in which she believed.

When Child died in 1880, her funeral was conducted in her Wayland parlor.  The eulogy was given by her frequent collaborator on abolition, women’s suffrage, and Indian rights, Wendell Phillips.  She was buried next to her much loved but improvident husband David.  They left no children.

The cover of one of the many editions of Child's most famous poem re-titled Over the River and Through the Woods.  Although she might have preferred being remembered for her abolition and women's rights work, as a passionate advocate of children's literature, I don't think she would be entirely disappointed.

Oh, did I forget to mention that seasonal song which is now just about the only thing Child is remembered for?  The words to the Thanksgiving song Over the River and Through the Woods were originally published in 1844 as a poem A Boy’s Thanksgiving Day in Volume II of Child’s collection Flowers for Children.  I could find no attribution for who set the popular poem to the now familiar tune.

 

The Time Was Right for NOW

The National Organization for Women founding conference in Washington, Betty Friedan at far right.

On October 29, 1966 thirty charter members gathered in Washington, D.C. to formally launch a new Civil Rights organization dedicated to improving the status of women in all areas of society.  In no time at all National Organization for Women (NOW) was shaking things up and spearheading a new wave of feminist activism.

The steam seemed to have gone out of the women’s movement after decades of struggle finally was rewarded with the adoption of The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920.  Without a clear, unifying focus organizations withered or went off in different directions.  Many assumed that when women exercised the franchise, other societal reforms would follow naturally.  

Alice Paul of National Women's Party toasting the final ratification of the 19th Amendment.  After the triumph of women's suffrage the feminist movement became unfocused and splintered.

Culturally the flappers of the 1920s seemed to signal a freedom from the cumbersome garments that had restricted the ability of women to move easily in the world and a daring new sexual equality.  The grim realities of the Depression years focused attention on other issues, especially unemployment which as seen as a problem of men who could not support their families.  World War II brought women into the work place as never before, proving that in a wide range of jobs from the factory floor to the executive suite that they were as capable as men.  But at war’s end there was enormous pressure on women to abandon their new jobs to make way for the waves of returning veterans.  Partly this was to prevent the post-war joblessness of veterans and that had haunted the immediate years after World War I.  

By the 1950 cultural expectations were pressing women to conform to a role in an entirely new kind of family—the autonomous nuclear family of dad, mom and kids with mom at home and without the support of extended family or community.  Even though more than a quarter of women of age remained in the work force they were increasingly confined to career ghettos as teachers, nurses, secretaries, and such with little or no chance of advancement.  Many more women, largely ignored even by activists willing to speak up, were employed in low level factory work, as waitresses, in retail, domestic service, and—most invisible of all—in agriculture.  The existing women’s organizations, while well-meaning and often vocal, seemed incapable of finding a handle on how to deal with the situation.

Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was the fuse that lit second wave feminism in the 1960's and which led to the founding of NOW.

There were stirrings of discontent.  Betty Friedan’s 1963 bestselling book The Feminine Mystique is generally regarded as both manifesto and a launching pad for a second wave of feminism.  But as much of a breakthrough as it was, it could not have been successful if it did not touch deep wells of discontent and resentment by women chaffing at their assigned roles in society.  The same year Congress passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963 which called for “equal pay for equal work” for women, but left it largely unenforceable and did not address the problem of low paying job ghettos.

The following year Southern Democrats inserted an amendment to add a ban on discrimination on account of gender to the Civil Rights Bill of 1964.  Although the original sponsor of the amendment, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Howard W. Smith of Virginia did have a long relationship with Alice Paul, the former militant leader of the National Women’s Party, most Southern Democrats supported the amendment in hopes it would derail the entire bill.  The strategy failed.  With the strong arm twisting of President Lyndon Johnson, a filibuster in the Senate was broken and the law passed with Title VII banning sex discrimination in employment intact. 

Women were nearly invisible at the ceremony when Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1963.  But Title VII of the law included what was meant to be a poison pill to kill the legislation--the inclusion of women the definition of employment discrimination.   NOW arose out of frustration in getting the law enforced for women.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was formed in 1965 to enforce the Civil Rights Act. Aileen Hernandez and Richard Graham fought hard as commission members to enforce the Title VII prohibition on sex discrimination but were outvoted 3 to 2 on the critical issue of whether sex segregation in job advertising was permissible.  A month later Yale law professor Dr. Pauli Murray, a member of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, made an impassioned public denouncement of the Commission’s decision. After reading an account in the press, Friedan contacted Murray and they began to explore possibilities for further action.

The first opportunity was the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women which met in Washington June 28-30, 1966 and was attended by both women.  Despite the theme of the Conference, Targets for Action, they and other women were stymied in an attempt to pass a resolution demanding that the EEOC carry out its legal mandate to end sex discrimination in employment. They were told that they had no authority to even put such a resolution forward.  Dissident EEOC commissioners Hernandez and Graham and Commission attorney Sonia Pressman Fuentes privately told Friedan that there was, “…need for an organization to speak on behalf of women in the way civil rights groups had done for Blacks.”

The National Organization for Women's familiar logo had its origins when Freidan doodle the initials NOW on a napkin in a meeting in her hotel room.

On the evening of June 19 fifteen or twenty angry women met in Freidan’s hotel room to plot a strategy including Murray, Catherine Conroy, Inka O’Hanrahan, Rosalind Loring, Mary Eastwood, Dorothy Haener, and Kay Clarenbach.  They agreed that some sort of organization was needed.  Freidan doodled the initials NOW on a napkin.  The next day at the formal concluding banquet for the Conference 28 women sat together.  According to participant Gene Bower, “Catherine Conroy pulled out a five-dollar bill from her wallet and, in her usual terse style, invited us to ‘put your money down and sign your name.’”  An infant organization was launched.

There was some debate whether NOW would be the National Association of or for Women.  The former would indicate an organization for women only; the latter would be open to men who agreed with its aims.  It was decided to be inclusive although only a handful of men, notably Commissioner Graham, were among the 300 or so charter members who signed on before the official founding conference in October.

Although only 10 % of that charter membership was able to attend the founding conference, participants wasted no time getting the new organization up and running.  Freidan was elected President, Clarenbach Board Chair, Hernandez Executive Vice President with the responsibility of day-to-day administration, Graham as Vice President and Caroline Davis Secretary-Treasurer.  The organization entrusted authority to its general membership in Annual Conferences with a Board of 35, including the five officers empowered to act between Conferences.  Between regular Board meetings the five-member Executive Committee would be free to act to carry out decided policy.

Freidan drafted a founding Statement of Purpose, which was intensely debated, but ultimately adopted with mostly cosmetic changes.  It outlined the broad concerns and aims of the organization in all aspects of affairs that impact women and avoided becoming a single issue organization.

On a practical level, the Conformance launched the first initiatives of the new organization including immediate action on Title VII enforcement efforts and authorization for a legal committee to take action on behalf of flight attendants and to challenge so-called protective labor legislation.  Task forces were devised to take up these and other issues.

Betty Freidan.

Describing the founding Conference Freidan wrote: 

We wasted no time on ceremonials or speeches, gave ourselves barely an hour for lunch and dinner...At times we got very tired and impatient, but there was always a sense that what we were deciding was not just for now “but for a century...” We shared a moving moment of realization that we had now indeed entered history.

Soon the rapidly growing organization in addition to pioneering work on workplace equality was spearheading a renewed drive for the Equal Rights Amendment, demanding the end of restrictions on access to contraceptives and abortion, pushing for equal opportunity in academics and sports.  NOW saw the “second wave” of feminism grow into a tidal wave by the end of the decade.  Dozens of other organizations, many of them seeded by NOW or founded by their leaders joined the efforts on specific issues.  

Passing the Equal Rights Amendment and securing abortion rights were central issues for NOW in its first decades.

Despite strains in the movement over militant separatism in the ‘70’s and changes in society, NOW remains the preeminent voice for women’s rights. Its familiar round logo is seen on signs at demonstration across the county wherever past gains are threatened or new ground is to be broken.  It has risen to the challenges of Trump Era misogyny and repeated assaults on hard fought feminist gains including freedom of reproductive choice, women’s health, and civil rights protections while confronting sexual harassment, intimidation, intimidation, and violence.  

Today young women energize NOW as it confronts Trump Era attacks.

Forgotten Pioneer Woman of American Letters—Lydia Maria Child

Lydia Maria Child as a young writer.

Lydia Maria Child died in her Wayland, Massachusetts home at age on October 20, 1880.  Chances are you never heard of her.  But she may have been the first American woman to earn her living as a professional writer and became one of the country’s leading social reform advocates.  If you remember her at all, it is probably because she penned a classic holiday song still sung by school children.

Child was born on February 11, 1802 in Medford, Massachusetts.  Her father Convers Francis was a businessman,banker, and a stern conventional Calvinist.  The youngest of three children, she received a conventional education at a local dame school and a female academy.  She was especially close to her oldest brother, Convers Jr. who encouraged her inquisitive mind and guided her reading.  She was bereft when he left home to attend Harvard when she was 9.

When her mother died, her father sent her to live with a recently married older sister in Maine where she was expected to act as a housekeeper and eventually a nurse for the children.  The curious Maria continued reading and when time allowed explored the area.  A visit to the nearby Penobscot settlement began a lifelong interest in and respect of Native Americans.

In 1819 young Maria took a teaching position in Gardiner, Maine.  She dabbled in mystic Swedenborgism but wrote her brother that “I am more in danger of wrecking on the rocks of skepticism than of standing on the shoals of fanaticism. I am apt to regard a system of religion as I do any other beautiful theory…”

Maria returned to Massachusetts in 1821 a dutifully took communion and became a member of the orthodox First Parish in Medford.  But she soon moved in with her brother Covers, now a Unitarian minister at First Parish in Watertown and attended his church regularly.  He encouraged her reading and gave her a magazine article that suggested that New England history might be fertile ground for an aspiring novelist.  

With Convers’ encouragement she dashed off her first novel Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times which was published in 1824 and is credited with being the one of first historical novels published in the United States coming out just months after James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, first of the Leatherstocking series.  Like Cooper’s book, it was also noted for its sympathetic portrayal of Native Americans.  From that time forward he dedicated herself to writing.

But it was not yet a profession that could support her.  The same year she opened her own school in Watertown and continued teach for the next four years.  In 1826 she founded Juvenile Miscellany, the first monthly periodical for children issued in the country.

Maria's husband David Lee Child, a reformer, journalist, and improvident businessman in mid life.  Their childless marriage and partnership endured despite often long separations as Maria pursued her career.

In 1826 Maria married Boston lawyer David Lee Child, an idealistic reformer who introduced her to the wide and tumultuous world of the Hub City’s intellectuals, activists, and especially radical abolitionists.  

Maria officially joined a conventional Congregational church but left it and began to attend worship with William Ellery Channing, although she despaired of his reluctance to fully embrace abolitionism.  She was soon a frequent participant in Margaret Fuller’s “conversations” held at Elizabeth Peabody’s North Street bookstore.  She became Fuller’s close friend and collaborator. 

Despite her loving relationship with her husband, he was frequently drawn in to improvident schemes or in trouble for his activism.  Twice he was jailed for debt.  The family had to rely largely on Maria’s earnings as a writer.  Inspired by her own experience she published The Frugal Housewife, a guide to making do with little.  It was a success and kept the family fed.

Child was a collaborator with fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison but broke with him after 11 years of close association in 1851 over his advocacy of violence and abstention from voting while slave states remained in the Union.  Although the events in Bloody Kansas and John Brown's Harper's Ferry Raid caused her to move toward approval of violence, the breach with Garrison was too raw and personal for her to resume that relationship.

In 1831 Maria became an associate of the nation’s most notorious abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison.  She became a leader of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and contributed to Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator.  Although an ardent supporter of women’s rights, she came to believe that the subjugation of women could not be ended until the still worse evil of slavery was ended.

From 1832 to ‘35 Child published five volumes of the Ladies Family Library featuring short biographies exemplifying feminine virtues for her growing audience of middle class women.  The books were popular and selling well until her unvarnished militancy was aired in her 1833 book  An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans.  Her radicalism alienated much of her audience.  Sales of her books for women plummeted, as did circulation of her magazine, which she was forced to suspend in 1834.

Child's anti-slavery book caused many of the middle class women readers she had carefully cultivated to abandon her. 

Defiant, Child turned her attention full time to the cause of abolitionism.  In 1839 she was elected to the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society.  The following year she was appointed editor of the Society’s influential publication, the National Anti-Slavery Standard and moved to New York City to assume her duties.  Her husband David, although nominally named her co-editor, remained in Massachusetts to work on a scheme to introduce sugar beet cultivation to the state to end dependence on slave harvested sugar cane.  Under New York law, Maria was able for the first time to separate her finances from those of her husband.

Her tenure at the Standard was a success and circulation grew with her policy of appealing to the whole family.  She continued her service on the board of American Anti-Slavery Society where she collaborated with Lucretia Mott and Maria Weston Chapman.  She wrote anti-slavery fiction as a way of broadening the appeal of the movement including the short stories The Quadroons in 1842 and Slavery’s Pleasant Homes: A Faithful Sketch 1843.

But in 1842 she broke with Garrison over his advocacy of refusing to vote as a protest against Union with slave holding states, his advocacy of violence, and organizational infighting.  She felt these positions would alienate her broadened readership base.  She resigned her editorship and turned her back for a while on the organized anti-slavery movement.  She vowed to work only with feminist and suffrage organizations.   

Child returned to her father's home in Wayland, Massachusetts which became her own home for most of the last 30 years of her life. 

Child remained in New York as a freelance writer for sometime before returning to reunite with her husband.  Together they cared for her ailing father in Wayland.  The old house became her home for most of the rest of her life.

In the 1850’s escalating tensions over the Fugitive Slave Act and the attack on her personal friend Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate re-invigorated her opposition to slavery and caused her to re-evaluate her previous absolute opposition to violence.  Outrages like the murderous raid of pro-slavery forces on Lawrence Kansas caused her to become more sympathetic to violence.  Her poem The Kansas Emigrants drew widespread attention.  

She was sympathetic to John Brown after his arrest for trying to lead a slave insurrection with his raid at Harpers’ Ferry.  She personally knew some of the prominent Bostonians including Rev. Theodore Parker who had financed the raid.  Child wrote letters of in support of Brown to Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise and published the exchange which was widely praised in the North and condemned in the South.

During the same decade she turned her attention to religion.  She had long been a seeker and although most frequently worshiped with the Unitarians, she found their practice sometimes cold and unsatisfying.  She plunged into a study of both the evolution of Christianity and of world religion.  She published her three volume The Progress of Religious Ideas through Successive Ages in 1854.  She hoped to remove “the superstitious rubbish from the sublime morality of Christ.”  The closely researched books were respectful of the contributions of many religions to the development of a refined human morality.  The books were highly praised, but sold poorly.  He close friend the Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson said of one volume that it was “too learned for a popular book and too popular for a learned one.”

As war clouds gathered, Child left Wayland for Boston where there was work that needed to be done in the winter of 1860-61.  She was back home when the war broke out and dedicated herself to charity work supporting contrabands—the slaves that fell into Union hands or escaped their masters by fleeing into the protection of the Army.  Concerned with their future, she edited the Freedmen’s Book, a reading primer for former slaves.

With the end of the war Child returned to earlier passions. The plight of Native Americans grabbed her attention and she authored a series of pamphlets on the issue.  Most influential was An Appeal for the Indians in 1868 which called upon government officials and religious leaders, to bring justice to the tribes, including the right to retain their lands, speak their languages, and practice their religions.  The pamphlet helped encourage the establishment of the Board of Indian Commissioners and the subsequent more slightly more lenient peace policy of the Ulysses S. Grant administration.

Child on the porch of her Wayland home in the post-Civil War era.

Child also resumed her work on behalf of women’s suffrage where she was a leader of a faction that demanded that free Black men get the vote first, or in conjunction with women.  She was a founder of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association.

In 1867 she was attracted to the Free Religious Association (FRA), a semi-impendent group of Unitarian ministers and congregations which were challenging the remnants of orthodoxy.  She attended worship at meetings on her frequent trips to Boston.  In 1878 she published Aspirations of the World, her own personal eclectic Bible made up of quotations culled from the religions of the world.  

Child’s husband David died in 1874.  Freed of his debts and schemes, she was for the first time in her life able to save money from her continuing active work as a popular writer.  She used her new found wealth to give generously to causes in which she believed.

When Child died in 1880, her funeral was conducted in her Wayland parlor.  The eulogy was given by her frequent collaborator on abolition, women’s suffrage, and Indian rights, Wendell Phillips.  She was buried next to her much loved but improvident husband David.  They left no children.

The cover of one of the many editions of Child's most famous poem re-titled Over the River and Through the Woods.  Although she might have preferred being remembered for her abolition and women's rights work, as a passionate advocate of children's literature, I don't think she would be entirely disappointed.

Oh, did I forget to mention that seasonal song which is now just about the only thing Child is remembered for?  The words to the Thanksgiving song Over the River and Through the Woods were originally published in 1844 as a poem A Boy’s Thanksgiving Day in Volume II of Child’s collection Flowers for Children.  I could find no attribution for who set the popular poem to the now familiar tune.