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Lydia L. Moland

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Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life Kindle Edition

by Lydia Moland (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.7 21 ratings

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Now in paperback, a compelling biography of Lydia Maria Child, one of nineteenth-century America’s most courageous abolitionists.

By 1830, Lydia Maria Child had established herself as something almost unheard of in the American nineteenth century: a beloved and self-sufficient female author. Best known today for the immortal poem “Over the River and through the Wood,” Child had become famous at an early age for spunky self-help books and charming children’s stories. But in 1833, Child shocked her readers by publishing a scathing book-length argument against slavery in the United States—a book so radical in its commitment to abolition that friends abandoned her, patrons ostracized her, and her book sales plummeted. Yet Child soon drew untold numbers to the abolitionist cause, becoming one of the foremost authors and activists of her generation.

Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life tells the story of what brought Child to this moment and the extraordinary life she lived in response. Through Child’s example, philosopher Lydia Moland asks questions as pressing and personal in our time as they were in Child’s: What does it mean to change your life when the moral future of your country is at stake? When confronted by sanctioned evil and systematic injustice, how should a citizen live? Child’s lifetime of bravery, conviction, humility, and determination provides a wealth of spirited guidance for political engagement today.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“[Lydia Maria Child was] a remarkable woman who needs to be remembered as one of the nineteenth century’s most influential Abolitionists. . . . A work of exemplary scholarship, Moland’s definitive biography of Child is extremely well written and invites both an academic and general readership." ― Booklist

"Moland's biography is ambitious, but she does an exceptional job of establishing how Lydia Maria Child continues to speak to us two hundred years later." ― The New England Quarterly

“This is a biography on a mission. As Moland shows us, to discover Child is to discover ourselves, revealing the best and worst of who we are. Moland is at her best when eviscerating the flawed arguments of Child’s opponents, arguments that, she reminds us, are ubiquitous even today. This is a brilliantly written book: stylish, witty, barbed yet sympathetic.” ― Laura Dassow Walls, author of 'Henry David Thoreau: A Life'

"Throughout this thoughtful, soulful work, one feels the author alternately energized by seeing her own ideological proclivities echoed in her story, validated in finding the political predicaments of her own time anticipated, and disturbed when her 19th-century subject fails to fully embody 21st-century values... Like a salvage crew, Moland has scoured an important lost life from the fathomless depths of the past." ― Los Angeles Review of Books

“Moland’s exuberant new biography gives us a Lydia Maria Child for the twenty-first century: a woman of fierce intelligence and astonishing ingenuity who never gave up the struggle to right the wrongs of enslavement and its legacy of race prejudice. Moland writes with a philosopher’s instinct to question both herself and the evidence she uncovers, yielding an intimate portrait that is also a history of America’s centuries-long reckoning with its founding principles.” ― Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of 'Margaret Fuller: A New American Life'

"Readers will find this an affecting, emotional story." ― Open Letters Review

“After the 2016 presidential election. . . Moland discovered Child, a woman, she later learned, ‘unwilling to accept the conventional wisdom of her time and unable to abide by its norms.’ . . . Moland began to wonder, ‘What could the example of her life teach me?’ And 'does the world need another white hero?' Moland’s Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life answers. . . . 'We might not need more white heroes,' she writes, 'but I have come to believe that white Americans like me need more examples like hers.'" ― New York Review of Books

"Moland’s highly readable biography depicts Child as a woman who approached abolitionism with a religious sense of duty. She may have abandoned her churchly faith, but she never gave up her pursuit of transcendent truth. This biography ought to restore Child’s name to the pantheon of American reformers." ― Christian Century

"Moland provides a thorough, much-needed examination
of 19th-century American author and activist Lydia Maria Child. . . Moland’s work provides valuable insight into this era and one of its greatest activists. Recommended." ― Choice

“Lydia Maria Child was one of the few great intellectual freedom fighters in nineteenth-century America. Moland’s magisterial book takes us in and through Child’s rich world and life in an exemplary manner. Don’t miss this powerful text on a giant still so relevant to our bleak times.” ― Cornel West, author of 'Race Matters'

"Moland wants us to think hard about what we owe each other as citizens and human beings. In that sense she has produced a call to arms, an almanac for activists, as well as an ample, honest, and immensely readable book." ― Wall Street Journal

"There are dozens of wonderful stories in this stew of a book. . . . Lydia Maria Child may or may not be 'truly living' in another world now, but in the pages of this book she is certainly alive, vibrant and inspiring." ― The Nation

About the Author

Lydia Moland is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Philosophy at Colby College. Her scholarship in German philosophy has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Academy in Berlin. Her work on Lydia Maria Child has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, in the Washington Post, in the Boston Globe, and on National Public Radio.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

She didn’t like her name.

Later in her life, someone asked why. “Suffice it to say,” she replied, “that some associations of childhood make the name of Lydia unpleasant to me.” It would not have been hard for some Lydia or other to make a bad impression: in nineteenth-century America, Lydias were everywhere. This Lydia herself had a great-grandmother, a grandmother, and an aunt by that name. As an adult, she would add a mother-in-law, a sister-in-law, a niece, and several namesakes to the chorus of Lydias around her. They were ubiquitous outside her family, too. Perhaps this is why her con-temporary Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose second wife was named Lydia, rechristened her Lidian. The marriage went downhill from there.

This Lydia would not wait for a man to rename her. By the time she was twenty, she had done it herself. But for now, Lydia Francis was the only name she had. And so until, by way of a religious quest and a complicated marriage, she became known to the world as L. Maria Child, Lydia Francis would have to do.

She was born on February 11, in Medford, Massachusetts. Medford was a small town on the Mystic River at the intersection of six colonial highways, about five miles northwest of Boston. The year was 1802. The American Revolution, with all its glory and uncertainty, was still in the recent past. The war was a vivid memory to her parents, who had both been ten years old when it started. Her father’s father had fought against the British, distinguishing himself at the battles of Lexington and Concord by killing five enemy soldiers. Her mother’s family had fled Charlestown during the Battle of Bunker Hill as the city burned behind them. There had been real poverty during those years— her father remembered that one winter, had a neighbor not shared extra potatoes with him and his nine siblings, they might well have starved. But now the war was over. Her parents had been born British subjects, but now they were American citizens, free and clear.

And what kind of country was the United States of America? In many ways, it was too early to tell. When Lydia Francis was born, Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president, was entering the second year of his first term in office. Already the country had weathered several crises that threatened its fragile union. Often those crises had to do with the fact that, despite Jefferson’s own soaring rhetoric about the self-evidence of human equality, by the time he took office almost a million humans were enslaved in the country whose ideals he was pledged to defend…
As her world began to take shape around her, little Lydia Francis began to recognize her immediate family. In addition to her parents, Convers Sr. and Susannah, there were four older children: James, Susannah, Mary, and Convers Jr. Of her siblings, probably Convers came into focus first. He was almost seven when she was born; one baby had died between their births. He seems to have taken being displaced by a younger child well, emerging early in his little sister’s memories as affectionate and attentive even as other family members were perhaps too busy to mind her. Their father had by now fought his way out of poverty through the system of apprenticeship and had, at long last, become a prosperous baker. He was even famous: his “Medford crackers”— a buttery, crunchy, labor-intensive biscuit— were sold throughout the Northeast and exported in large quantities to England. The family lived in a two-story house across the street from the local cemetery, where at least one ancestral Lydia was buried. Next to their house was the bakery, a sign hanging in front for passersby to see.

One of Lydia’s earliest memories was of almost dying. Some “long, protracted” sickness had taken hold, and the doctor had given up. She had, she remembered, been “laid away for dead.” What had that been like? Had she sensed her family sorrowing over her, her mother weeping but resigned, the room emptying as she fought alone against the fever or infection that was sapping her strength? Whatever it was, at some point her tiny body turned it back. Perhaps she opened her eyes in a dark room and became conscious of muffled activity downstairs. Or perhaps Convers was sitting there watching. Her illness had not killed her; it had made her stronger. Thereafter, her constitution was “hardy as an oak.”
Her parents were hardworking, frugal people. They had, she recalled, “small opportunity for culture”; there had been “nothing like literary influence in the family, or its surroundings.” There was, of course, religion. The Francis family, like most people in the town, were Congregationalists, which meant they were Calvinists. This in turn involved a crushing belief that humans were fundamentally sinful, in many cases destined for a very real and eternal hell. No one could evade suspicion of damnation, but if you were prosperous, you might convince yourself and others that God favored you. And so people like Convers Francis Sr. worked very, very hard to prosper, resulting in a work ethic that became as famous as the goods it produced.

It was the job of the Reverend David Osgood, minister of Medford’s First Parish Church, to deliver this message of uncertain salvation to the town’s sinful but striving inhabitants. Indeed, Lydia long recalled her minister’s ominous weekly incantations along with his shining white hair. But it seems that by the time she was old enough to remember, his message had also softened. Like many near Boston, he was being drawn to an interpretation of Christianity—soon to be known as Unitarianism— that depicted God as more loving than punishing and humans as capable of both freedom and goodness. But whatever their minister’s reformist tendencies were, Lydia’s father never lost his belief in hell or his conviction that his children might go there. Once a month, she and Convers were sent to Reverend Osgood to recite the old-fashioned catechism that promised as much. There she also encountered his daughters— Mary and Lucy— a few years older than she and clearly very bright. She must have watched the daughters of this learned man— growing up in a household full of books and ideas— with a mixture of admiration and envy. It seems that the fascination was mutual: well into adulthood, the Osgood sisters remembered the baker’s daughter who recited her catechism in their home as exhibiting considerable spirit and spunk.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0B3SBTGTC
Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press (October 7, 2022)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 7, 2022
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 6671 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 568 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,225,734 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,826 in Biographies & Memoirs of Authors
- #5,886 in Biographies & Memoirs of Women
- #7,278 in Historical Biographies (Kindle Store)

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4.7 21 ratings

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Li Kynvi

favorite biography ever!

Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2023

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One of the many important things I learned from Lydia Moland’s fantastic biography was the way Lydia Maria Child (LMC) employed the wide variety and and array of her many gifts to fight not only against slavery, but also against race- and gender-based oppression during the first 2/3 of her 19th century lifetime. In LMC’s case that meant everything from children’s literature to sewing wool caps, from deeply researched scholarly volumes to sugar beet farming, from prophetic foresight to the most profound, challenging, and costly morality-based activism I can imagine, and sustained over 50 years. All the while Child held—with her characteristic “fierce humility” (Moland’s fabulous phrase)—that no matter what she was sacrificing, it always paled in comparison with what Black Americans dealt with, both those who were free and those who were enslaved.

Lydia Maria Child started her writing career as a novelist, and Lydia Moland beautifully highlights the way Child brought her natural and finely-honed ability to deeply imagine her way into other people’s lives, struggles, hearts, minds, and souls to bear on her abolitionist writings and activism. In a parallel way, Lydia Moland brings her prodigious skills as a compassionate philosopher to bear on this biography. The voice Moland writes in makes this the favorite and most engaging biography I’ve read in my almost 6 decades.

Everyone writes from their personal perspective, and I tire of people not admitting it. Moland owns the fact that she is the lens through which LMC’s life is told, and brings us with her in her an exploration of the serious moral questions LMC faced in her life. It will be no surprise to anyone that the pre-Civil War U.S. faced many of the same questions we face today. I didn’t just read—I experienced, reflected, felt, and journaled my way through this fabulous book, fully engaged with the questions Moland invites us into even as she wrestles with them herself.

Moland is funny, wry, honest, insightful, and feels so present in her book. From the first page I was dialoguing with her, addressing her as “you” in my musings. My copy is so full of marginalia that it’s amusing. The typeset is beautifully done, comfortable to read—not too many words on a line or page, plenty of margins for the extensive writing some of us do—and sprinkled throughout with portraits and other illustrations.

I’m now engaged in reading Child’s writing directly, as well as other books about people in Child’s circles. I’m buying copies of Moland’s book for local libraries, and have two friends waiting to borrow my copy. First I have to be willing to let go of it for a few weeks. Not quite yet.

5 people found this helpful

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Rutilus

A timely recovery

Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2023

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Like her younger contemporary Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child was famous in her day, only to fade into oblivion a few generations after her death. Lydia Moland builds on existing scholarly biographies as well as her own research to make her come alive for our own time, not only by telling us about her undoubted gifts and her many achievements, but also by guiding us through the dark corridors of her doubts and hesitations. We see Child struggling to figure out what her obligations were -- how to act in the face of slavery and genocide, of misogyny, of public complacency and cynical opportunism; how to live up to what she felt was her "duty." Here is where a brilliant philosopher makes all the difference: by focusing on the moral choices her subject made, on the connections between understanding and action: if I know of this evil, what am I compelled to do about it? One of the many strengths of Moland's portrait is that so many parallels with our own time and with our own moral choices appear in the reader's mind as if by magic. And she takes seriously the moral challenge to act on her own understanding, as we learn in her moving epilogue. Beautifully written, this is a memorable achievement, one of the best biographies I have read in many years.

3 people found this helpful

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Jane

A Revelation!

Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2023

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Lydia Maria Childs (1802 - 1880)- (a patriotic woman I had never read about or heard of ) was a powerful force in the Abolitionist movement that helped to free the slaves and was also a force in woman's rights. As a best selling author, editor, and abolitionist, wife, sister, daughter - she championed and befriended the disenfranchised through out her life. With herculean effort she supported herself, at times her husband and father as well as friends in need. She led a life that many of us wish for - a fully realized life. She is an inspiration. The book - has gravitas and is eloquently written by Lydia Moland, a teacher of philosophy. I could not put it down! For me and many of us to come it will be a REVELATION.

3 people found this helpful

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Kerry McDonald

Stunning biography

Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2023

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This is one of the best biographies I’ve ever read. The life of Lydia Marie Child reads like a novel. It is the kind of book that every two pages you are stopping and telling the person next to you some new amazing part of her life. I especially liked the way that Moland gave her first person perspective. Someone needs to make a movie out of this!

2 people found this helpful

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Thomas Mickewich

Compelling story, beautifully told.

Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2023

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A timely narrative of a life and purpose that should give us all pause as we read and live through all too many of today's headlines. Wonderfully written, with an attitude.

3 people found this helpful

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Jane H. Sciacca

A new look at an important person

Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2022

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A stirring tale of a real heroine.

3 people found this helpful

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Leifred

Inspiring!

Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2023

Well-research biography of an incredible abolitionist. I loved it!

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Jehoshephat

I couldn't get through it

Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2023

The author is an academic philosopher, and her big issue in the "Personal Prologue" was "How do I make this philosophical?" (Didn't Ms. Child already solve that "problem"?) I found the whole thing tedious and rather condescending to its subject.

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