Speaker 1: I now, as ever, would avoid any discussion of the
Speaker 1: woman question. But when a man advises me to withdraw
Speaker 1: from a society or convention, or not to act there
Speaker 1: according to the dictates of my own judgment, I am
Speaker 1: constrained to reply, thou canst not touch the freedom of
Speaker 1: my soul. I deem that I have duties to perform here.
Speaker 1: I make no onset upon your opinions and prejudices. But
Speaker 1: my moral responsibility lies between God and my own conscience.
Speaker 1: No human being can have jurisdiction over that. Those are
Speaker 1: the words of nineteenth century author and abolitionist Lydia Mariah Child,
Speaker 1: an enormously influential figure, has been mostly forgotten today. Her
Speaker 1: words are read here by historian Lydia Moland. Recent book
Speaker 1: should bring back the public recognition Child so richly deserves.
Speaker 1: I'm a land Revere and this is Seneca's on women
Speaker 1: to hear. We are bringing you one hundred of the
Speaker 1: world's most inspiring and history making women you need to hear.
Speaker 1: In the eighteen twenties, Lydia Mariah Child was one of
Speaker 1: the most popular writers in America. She wrote a blockbuster
Speaker 1: novel about interracial romance. She published a guide book for housewives,
Speaker 1: and she found it the first American magazine for children.
Speaker 1: And then she threw away that success by becoming a
Speaker 1: fierce and controversial advocate for freeing the country's enslaved people
Speaker 1: and for racial equality. Lydia Moland, a professor of philosophy
Speaker 1: at Colby College in Maine, is the author of a
Speaker 1: recent book about this amazing figure, Lydia Maria Child, a
Speaker 1: radical American life. Listen and learn from Lydia Moland why
Speaker 1: Lydia Maria Child is one of Seneca's on women to gear.
Speaker 1: I'm speaking today to Lydia Moland. Welcome, Lydia. We're delighted
Speaker 1: to have you with us for this conversation. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much, as an honor to be here with you. Well.
Speaker 1: In the nineteenth century, Lydia Mariah Child was famous as
Speaker 1: an author and abolitionist, a feminist, a crusader for Native
Speaker 1: American rights, but few contemporary Americans had ever heard of
Speaker 1: her until your recent book. Um, if they did know
Speaker 1: her name, I think it was for writing the classic
Speaker 1: Thanksgiving song over the River and through the Woods, which
Speaker 1: were all familiar with. But why has she been forgotten
Speaker 1: and what should she be remembered for yes, it's a
Speaker 1: wonderful question. So Child was born in eighteen o two,
Speaker 1: and by the time she was a young woman still
Speaker 1: in the eighteen twenties, she was already a beloved and
Speaker 1: very famous author. She'd written a couple of novels, she'd
Speaker 1: written some children's literature, she'd written a self help book,
Speaker 1: which I think we'll talk about in a moment um.
Speaker 1: So she was really the nineteenth century equivalent of a
Speaker 1: household name already. And then in eighteen thirty she converted
Speaker 1: to abolitionism, which was the at that time very radical
Speaker 1: claim that slavery should end immediately and without compensation to
Speaker 1: enslavers and this um. Some people have compared that to
Speaker 1: the radical nature of that to being to saying that
Speaker 1: you were a communist. In the nineteen fifties, for instance,
Speaker 1: it was just a real social taboo. Most Northerners, if
Speaker 1: they disapproved of slavery, thought that it was probably unfortunate,
Speaker 1: but there wasn't a whole lot they could do about it,
Speaker 1: and probably it was best to just leave it well
Speaker 1: enough alone. But Child decided in eighteen thirty, when she
Speaker 1: converted to abolitionism, that she would devote the rest of
Speaker 1: her life to fighting slavery and fighting for racial justice.
Speaker 1: So she spent the next three years researching and writing
Speaker 1: a book that she published in eighteen thirty three called
Speaker 1: an Appeal for that class of Americans called Africans. And
Speaker 1: this book was just a a fire hose of arguments
Speaker 1: against the excuses that people had used, that white Americans
Speaker 1: had used to turn away from caring about slavery. So
Speaker 1: there was a chapter on politics, and a chapter on history,
Speaker 1: and a chapter on economics, um all showing that slavery
Speaker 1: was an evil that the United States needed to eradicate immediately.
Speaker 1: And then in the last chapter of that book, she
Speaker 1: turns her attention to her fellow white Northerners and makes
Speaker 1: very clear that it was their complicity in slavery that
Speaker 1: allowed slavery to continue. And this was so shocking and
Speaker 1: so insulting to her readership all over the United States,
Speaker 1: but especially in Boston, that she was really ostracized for
Speaker 1: this publication. Her books went out of print, people stopped
Speaker 1: speaking to her, her family was embarrassed by her um
Speaker 1: and she but she spent the next fifty years of
Speaker 1: her life just fighting racial injustice in every way. She
Speaker 1: knew how Um, including her life intersecting and fascinating ways
Speaker 1: with the Civil War era, like the caning of Charles
Speaker 1: Sumner Um, John Brown's insurrection, Robert gould Shaw's death, like
Speaker 1: all of these ways that her life that we can
Speaker 1: learn about those episodes from the way she interacted with them.
Speaker 1: All of that to say, that's what she should be
Speaker 1: famous for, that lifetime of dedication to fighting racial injustice.
Speaker 1: It was definitely her life's work. And the fact that
Speaker 1: she is instead famous for one of our most sentimental poems,
Speaker 1: the irony of that would not be lost on her.
Speaker 1: Let me just put it that way. M hm, Well,
Speaker 1: you certainly bring her alive and in the real sense
Speaker 1: that she should be remembered for. I'm wondering as you're speaking,
Speaker 1: how did you get interested in her? Yes, this is
Speaker 1: such a wonderful, serendipitous story. So this was really after
Speaker 1: the election I had I'm a philosopher by training. I'd
Speaker 1: been writing about German philosophy for my whole academic career.
Speaker 1: But after the election of twin sixteen, I just had
Speaker 1: the sense that I needed to turn to women. I
Speaker 1: needed to find out how women had faced moral emergencies
Speaker 1: in the United States, and I had a kind of
Speaker 1: distant memory that women had been important in the abolitionist movement.
Speaker 1: I went to this Lessenger Library at Radcliffe Institute at Harvard,
Speaker 1: and I asked the librarians there to help me find
Speaker 1: a woman who had thought philosophically in the quest to
Speaker 1: end enslatement in the United States, and completely serendipitously, I
Speaker 1: was given a box of letters that had a letter
Speaker 1: by her in it, and it just electrified me. I
Speaker 1: was so moved by it, and so touched by how
Speaker 1: hard she had worked for the cause and how much
Speaker 1: of her life she had dedicated to it that when
Speaker 1: I started reading more about her and realized everything else
Speaker 1: that she and um, I thought, she really needs to
Speaker 1: be better known, and I think she can help us
Speaker 1: at a moment of moral emergency in our country today. Well,
Speaker 1: and how good for us that you did. Did you
Speaker 1: face any particular challenges in writing about her? I would
Speaker 1: say one of the more humorous challenges is that, since
Speaker 1: she's so little known, her collected correspondence is mostly on microfiche. UM,
Speaker 1: I hope your listeners even remember what that was. It's
Speaker 1: a very antiquated mode of storing information. UM, I remember,
Speaker 1: you know, working with it in the eighties. But her UM,
Speaker 1: her letters haven't been updated. There is a wonderful collection
Speaker 1: of them, and a reader that has been published by
Speaker 1: Caroline CarShare that has some of her writings. But I
Speaker 1: needed to spend week after week after week at a
Speaker 1: microfiche machine at the Boston at NAUM reading her correspondence.
Speaker 1: So that was a kind of amusing challenge. And I
Speaker 1: would say the other challenge was just trying to learn
Speaker 1: enough of my own country's history to be able to
Speaker 1: explain things to readers like why were there violent anti
Speaker 1: abolitionist mobs in the North for years? And why were
Speaker 1: so many abolitionists uneasy with John Brown's raid? And why
Speaker 1: were there so many um, contorted arguments made around the
Speaker 1: fifteenth Amendment. All of those things just took a lot
Speaker 1: of um reading and thinking and researching on my part.
Speaker 1: It was a joy and it was a challenge, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you had to be determined to be able to
Speaker 1: do it. Uh. And some of those challenges well. Her
Speaker 1: first book was a novel called Obamack, which was published
Speaker 1: in eighteen four, which she was only twenty two, and
Speaker 1: it caused a scandal tell us why what it was
Speaker 1: about that book that was so controversial. Yes, this is
Speaker 1: a fascinating story. So this novel was essentially about a
Speaker 1: love triangle that featured a young white European settler named
Speaker 1: Mary Um, a young Englishman named Charles, and a Native
Speaker 1: American warrior whom she called Hobbamock, and the way the
Speaker 1: plot develops. At a certain point, Mary thinks that Charles
Speaker 1: has died and for complicated reasons, blames her father for it,
Speaker 1: and as a kind of revenge against her very puritanical father,
Speaker 1: she runs away and marries this Native American warrior. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's very clear loves her dearly. She lives with him,
Speaker 1: she loves him in return. They have a child together,
Speaker 1: and then lo and behold, Charles shows up again. He's
Speaker 1: not dead Um, and Hobbamock at that point decides to
Speaker 1: seed his right to both his wife and their son
Speaker 1: to this European So he just um to disappears into
Speaker 1: the forest and has never seen again. So, as I
Speaker 1: say in the book, it's it's almost like she managed
Speaker 1: to put together a plot that included an insubordinate daughter
Speaker 1: and indictment of a puritan, inter racial sex, a mixed
Speaker 1: race Child, and a kind of divorce. I mean, it
Speaker 1: was like all of the taboos um at once that
Speaker 1: she was breaking. But even beyond that, the book was
Speaker 1: scandalous because it did not end the way most literature
Speaker 1: about Native Americans at that point ended, which was in
Speaker 1: a kind of violent victory by the European settlers over
Speaker 1: the Native Americans. So instead, the picture that Child gives
Speaker 1: us is of a Native American warrior who is willing
Speaker 1: to go away in a kind of noble sacrifice. And
Speaker 1: that was part of her way of saying, in a
Speaker 1: way that she really regretted later, but it was her
Speaker 1: way of saying, um, we do not want to perpetuate
Speaker 1: injustice against Native Americans, but they will eventually fade away.
Speaker 1: And it was about five years later that she completely
Speaker 1: changed her mind about that. She decided that holding that
Speaker 1: kind of opinion was wrong and injurious to Native Americans.
Speaker 1: And she really spent the rest of her life arguing
Speaker 1: when she talked about Native Americans that they had every
Speaker 1: right to continue to exist. That that European settlers did
Speaker 1: utterly fascinating. So we go on to eighty six, when
Speaker 1: she founded and edited the first American Children's magazine The
Speaker 1: Juvenile Miss Selamy. What were her views on children and
Speaker 1: how should how should they be treated? Those views, Yes,
Speaker 1: the these were wonderful publications for children that she did
Speaker 1: in the eighteen twenties. They were full of like The
Speaker 1: Juvenile Miscellany was full of games and puzzles, and fiction
Speaker 1: and non fiction and poetry. It was a quarterly publication,
Speaker 1: so people long into middle age would remember how excited
Speaker 1: they were when it arrived at their doorstep and they
Speaker 1: could read it. And it was popular up and down
Speaker 1: the East Coast. And exactly as you say, her views
Speaker 1: about children are really interesting and in many ways very
Speaker 1: progressive UM, insofar as she thought that children should be
Speaker 1: treated kindly. You should never lie to your children, You
Speaker 1: should encourage their native curiosity. You should give them toys
Speaker 1: that helped them learn. You should treat them with respect.
Speaker 1: They should get lots of exercise. They should play outside.
Speaker 1: The girls should also get to play. UM. And she
Speaker 1: was also very stern and principled. But there's always a
Speaker 1: kind of undercurrent that children are human beings to be
Speaker 1: treasured and nurtured, and UM given a foundation to become
Speaker 1: good American citizens by developing virtues like honesty and integrity
Speaker 1: and patients. So they're they're wonderful even to read today.
Speaker 1: In fact, believe it or not, I found one in
Speaker 1: a gift shop the other day. Um, just along with
Speaker 1: like Christmas ornaments and things people were buying, and the
Speaker 1: owner of the shop said that they were selling really well.
Speaker 1: So my goodness. So did somebody revive the magazine? Yes?
Speaker 1: And I'm sorry this wasn't the magazine. I should have
Speaker 1: corrected that. This was something she wrote called the Mother's Book,
Speaker 1: book full of advice for mothers. She herself never had children,
Speaker 1: but she had been living with a sister who had
Speaker 1: a large family, and she apparently picked up a lot
Speaker 1: of parenting advice from that. M hm. So then we
Speaker 1: go to eighty nine when she published her most popular book,
Speaker 1: The Frugal Housewife. Now what made it so different from
Speaker 1: her other books of the time or other guide books
Speaker 1: of the time, and why was it such a hit? Yes,
Speaker 1: this was another thing she published that people would talk
Speaker 1: about well into adulthood. They would remember how their mothers
Speaker 1: cooked out of it, and they would in some cases
Speaker 1: remember how disappointed they were that the Frugal Housewife books
Speaker 1: said that their mothers shouldn't buy preserves for them, which
Speaker 1: I guess was the equivalent of buying candy or something.
Speaker 1: Um it was a book exactly as the title said.
Speaker 1: Um Child wanted to write a cookbook for those who
Speaker 1: were not aspiring to be wealthy. So it was a
Speaker 1: wonderful thing for the these beginning decades of the United
Speaker 1: States when a lot of people didn't have a lot
Speaker 1: of money and did need to know how to make
Speaker 1: do with preserving things and conserving things, knowing how to
Speaker 1: use every part of a cut of meat or every
Speaker 1: part of a vegetable for um cooking. It also had
Speaker 1: wonderful just house cleaning tips about getting rid of bed
Speaker 1: bugs or stuffing a mattress with feathers, or helping someone
Speaker 1: who had sprained their ankles. So it was really meant
Speaker 1: to empower Americans to be self sufficient. And it was
Speaker 1: also a kind of political treatise insofar as every once
Speaker 1: in a while, in the midst of talking about some recipe,
Speaker 1: she'll just break off and say something like, we really
Speaker 1: will never succeed as a country unless we know how
Speaker 1: to resist becoming an aristocracy, and will only manage to
Speaker 1: avoid being an aristocracy if we all know how to
Speaker 1: cook and clean for ourselves. So it's really a multilayered
Speaker 1: publication that I think appealed so much to Americans at
Speaker 1: that moment who wanted to figure out what it meant
Speaker 1: to be American in very everyday ways like how to
Speaker 1: roast a goose, and also big principled ways like what
Speaker 1: kind of attitude to have towards consumption or towards aristocratic
Speaker 1: tendencies and income inequality. Senecas one hundred Women to hear
Speaker 1: will be back after the short break. Well, she was
Speaker 1: very prolific, it seems, as a writer, because she went
Speaker 1: on to publish an appeal in favor of that class
Speaker 1: of Americans called Africans, the first book length anti slavery work.
Speaker 1: So tell us what was notable about this book and
Speaker 1: what was its impact. Yes, the that appeal was in
Speaker 1: a tradition already that had, as one example, David Walker's Appeal.
Speaker 1: And David Walker was a black man living in Boston
Speaker 1: and he published something. It had a very long title.
Speaker 1: It's usually called Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.
Speaker 1: And that book was um a denunciation of American slavery,
Speaker 1: both in religious terms and in political terms. So David
Speaker 1: Walker excoriated Americans for calling themselves Christians and being willing
Speaker 1: to enslave people and to torture those people, to break
Speaker 1: up families, um to steal their labor. And he also
Speaker 1: excoriated them for failing America's political principles. And he was
Speaker 1: very explicit about Thomas Jefferson in particular, being an example
Speaker 1: of someone who could articulate very lofty values and then
Speaker 1: was not living up to them. Those were a kind
Speaker 1: of series of addresses. And the way I think Child
Speaker 1: expands on that and and goes in a different direction,
Speaker 1: in a more argumentative direction, is that she really accumulates
Speaker 1: evidence from travelers accounts in the South, from Southern laws
Speaker 1: about who could be enslaved, how much an enslaved person
Speaker 1: should be punished, under what conditions, um enslaved people could
Speaker 1: be allowed to read. All of these things that were
Speaker 1: evidence for Northern readers, especially that American enslavement was particularly evil. So,
Speaker 1: as I said earlier, she has whole chapters on why
Speaker 1: slave economies are worse than economies that use free labor.
Speaker 1: She has a whole chapter on how cow worldly Northern
Speaker 1: politicians had been in the face of Southern enslavers. And
Speaker 1: then in this last chapter, as I say, she very
Speaker 1: clearly Um indicts northerners for profiting from the slave trade,
Speaker 1: for profiting on crops that had been grown by enslaved people,
Speaker 1: like cotton, but then also for being um for having
Speaker 1: racist beliefs that meant that they treated black people terribly
Speaker 1: so keeping them out of churches and schools and stage
Speaker 1: coaches and hotels. She talks about people yelling racial epithets
Speaker 1: in the street, Um, and she just very clearly says
Speaker 1: without that prejudice in the North, slavery would not succeed
Speaker 1: in the South m hm. And I've lived in the
Speaker 1: North my whole life, and I do think that we
Speaker 1: all too often and have a kind of sense of superiority,
Speaker 1: moral superiority, and so far as we think that slavery
Speaker 1: was a Southern problem and racism is a Southern problem,
Speaker 1: and Child was just not having that. She would not
Speaker 1: allow her fellow northerners UM to forget that slavery existed
Speaker 1: in part because of their willingness to indulge in these
Speaker 1: kinds of prejudices. Did the influence of this work live
Speaker 1: on for some time or yes, yeah, thank you for
Speaker 1: reminding me of that part of the question. Absolutely. So,
Speaker 1: there are a couple of really influential abolitionists who were
Speaker 1: one over to abolitionism through her writing. One was Charles Sumner,
Speaker 1: so the the senator from Massachusetts who much later, right
Speaker 1: before the Civil War, was beaten bloody and unconscious on
Speaker 1: the Senate floor for his abolitionist beliefs. So he was
Speaker 1: one of her um disciples, as it were. Another one
Speaker 1: um was Wendell Phillips, who was one of the most
Speaker 1: important orators of the abolitionist movement, who became an abolitionist
Speaker 1: after he read the Appeal. And then the other one
Speaker 1: is that I'll just mentioned is Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who
Speaker 1: was one of the people who funded John Brown's insurrection
Speaker 1: in Virginia, and he too said that he came to
Speaker 1: abolitionist beliefs through Child's writings. But there are also people
Speaker 1: would write to her through her whole life and say
Speaker 1: things like I read your works when I was a child,
Speaker 1: and they formed my life's opinions, and I'm so grateful
Speaker 1: to you for setting me on a good course of
Speaker 1: moral behavior. Well that's high praise, and clearly she made
Speaker 1: a difference. Um which is rather extraordinary. So where was
Speaker 1: she on women's rights. Did she have any relationships with
Speaker 1: other feminists of the time. Was that something that she
Speaker 1: wrote about or spoke out about. Yes, definitely. I would
Speaker 1: say that her relationship to women's rights was a little
Speaker 1: more complicated than her attitude towards abolitionism. She felt so
Speaker 1: uncomplicated and devoted to the abolitionist cause, but early in
Speaker 1: her life she felt sort of ambivalent about promoting her
Speaker 1: rights as a woman, and I think that's really interesting.
Speaker 1: She would often say, I'm more comfortable advocating for other
Speaker 1: people's rights than for my own, which is admirable of course.
Speaker 1: And there's no question that the abolition of slavery was
Speaker 1: a moral imperative um in a way that she very
Speaker 1: rightly responded to. She also got really caught up in
Speaker 1: one of the most painful moments in the abolitionist movement,
Speaker 1: which was when abolitionists split over the question of whether
Speaker 1: women should be allowed to speak. So, as many of
Speaker 1: your listeners will know, there's a Biblical passage that's often
Speaker 1: been used to claim that women should not be allowed
Speaker 1: to speak in public. At the beginning of the abolitionist movement,
Speaker 1: among the people who were the most radical, that was
Speaker 1: not a problem, and women were actually encouraged to speak,
Speaker 1: especially if they were leaders in the movement like she was.
Speaker 1: But as the movement grew and started to include more
Speaker 1: conservative members, they started to say, we need the women
Speaker 1: to stand back and not to advocate, and certainly not
Speaker 1: to speak in public. And so that put people like
Speaker 1: Child and other women that she was working with, like
Speaker 1: the grim Key Sisters, um in the position of having
Speaker 1: to fight for women's rights first in order to continue
Speaker 1: to fight for the abolition of slavery. So, if you
Speaker 1: don't mind, I have a really quick quote that I
Speaker 1: just love from her from this stage of the of
Speaker 1: the fight within the abolish this movement, she says, I now,
Speaker 1: as ever, would avoid any discussion of the woman question.
Speaker 1: But when a man advises me to withdraw from a
Speaker 1: society or convention or not to act there according to
Speaker 1: the dictates of my own judgment, I am constrained to reply,
Speaker 1: thou can'st not touch the freedom of my soul. I
Speaker 1: deem that I have duties to perform here. I make
Speaker 1: no onset upon your opinions and prejudices, But my moral
Speaker 1: responsibility lies between God and my own conscience. No human
Speaker 1: being can have jurisdiction over that. So that was her
Speaker 1: her response to the men who wanted her to back
Speaker 1: off so that she, as a woman, wouldn't get in
Speaker 1: the way of more conservative members of the movement wanting
Speaker 1: her not to speak. Well, good for her, Yeah, exactly
Speaker 1: the way ahead of her time, right wait, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: And then I will say that, Um, after the war,
Speaker 1: she was very supportive of Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Susan B.
Speaker 1: Anthony's um efforts to get suffrage for women. So there
Speaker 1: are very enthusiastic letters between them, um at a certain stage.
Speaker 1: But then, as many of your listeners will know, at
Speaker 1: a certain point, Um, Elizabeth Katie Stanton, especially when it
Speaker 1: became clear that the fifteenth Amendment was going to give
Speaker 1: the vote to black men but not to women, Standon
Speaker 1: and Anthony decided to oppose the fifteenth Amendment and unfortunately
Speaker 1: did so sometimes in very racist language and tried to
Speaker 1: frighten white men out of voting for the fifteenth Amendment
Speaker 1: out of fear of black men. And child just detested this. Um.
Speaker 1: She she saw immediately what damage it would do and
Speaker 1: how wrong headed it was. So she essentially broke from
Speaker 1: that part of the movement. She didn't associate with Stanton
Speaker 1: and Anthony anymore, and instead, through her efforts behind people
Speaker 1: like Francis Ellen, Watkins, Harper, and Lucy Stone who were
Speaker 1: supporting the fifteenth Amendment and also working for women's suffrage.
Speaker 1: So Child was someone who her whole life felt very
Speaker 1: deeply and painfully the limitations imposed on her for being
Speaker 1: a woman. Uh And she, especially towards the end of
Speaker 1: her life, wrote with great passion and just argumentative power
Speaker 1: about that. Well, she she seems to have accomplished so much.
Speaker 1: How was she able to do that? And you were
Speaker 1: just mentioning her great desire to break away from the
Speaker 1: conventions that we're holding women back and writing about that forcefully.
Speaker 1: How was she able to do that? This is such
Speaker 1: a great question, and I you know, in a way
Speaker 1: to me it still feels like a mystery sometimes how
Speaker 1: some people marshal the resources to dedicate their whole lives
Speaker 1: to something, despite you know, in her case, suffering real
Speaker 1: poverty for most of her life. After she threw away
Speaker 1: her literary career. I'll just mentioned two brief things that
Speaker 1: I that were not barriers for her that I think
Speaker 1: often are barriers for women, and certainly were in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century. The first was that she had a husband
Speaker 1: who loved her mind and who supported her intellectual pursuits
Speaker 1: and who encouraged her to write in these quote unquote
Speaker 1: masculine spheres like politics and economics. Um. They had a
Speaker 1: very complicated marriage that was not always good for her.
Speaker 1: It got so complicated at a certain point that they
Speaker 1: separated for about ten years. But unlike someone like Julia Ward,
Speaker 1: how she was not always fighting the husband who was
Speaker 1: trying to hold her intellect back. Um. And they also
Speaker 1: never had children. They did want children, and it was
Speaker 1: a great sorrow to them that they never had any.
Speaker 1: But she was also very clear that she would not
Speaker 1: have been able to do what she did had she
Speaker 1: had children. And I wish that that weren't still a
Speaker 1: barrier for many women, but as we know it, it
Speaker 1: often is. But I will also say that she had
Speaker 1: a kind of vision of what she wanted her country
Speaker 1: to be. She she loved this country so deeply, and
Speaker 1: she loved its principles so deeply that she was heartbroken
Speaker 1: at all of the ways that we were not living
Speaker 1: up to our potential, and so I think that gave
Speaker 1: her enormous energy to fight to get Americ pitkins to
Speaker 1: actually live up to their beliefs. And she also had
Speaker 1: just a deep conviction about human equality. Many abolitionists, as
Speaker 1: your listeners will know, we're in favor of end slavery,
Speaker 1: but they were not in favor of racial equality. So
Speaker 1: there was an enormous amount of racism within the abolitionist
Speaker 1: movement itself. And while Child's record on these things is
Speaker 1: not perfect, she definitely had attitudes towards Black Americans um
Speaker 1: that were patronizing or that put burdens on them to
Speaker 1: behave a certain way so that white people would accept them. More,
Speaker 1: she did believe in racial equality, and that gave her
Speaker 1: a kind of passion and compassion for anyone who was
Speaker 1: being treated unjustly that I think made her really powerful.
Speaker 1: And I'll just mention one other thing that I think
Speaker 1: is so interesting, which is that I think she was
Speaker 1: really good at knowing what she was good at and
Speaker 1: what she loved, and then marshaling those things to fight
Speaker 1: the fight that was most important to her. So she
Speaker 1: would sometimes say things like I love this one committee
Speaker 1: work is not my work. So so she recognized that
Speaker 1: committees were important to abolitionism, but she hated them. So
Speaker 1: when she would get on a committee, she would recognize
Speaker 1: that it kind of sapped her energies and cramped her powers,
Speaker 1: and so then she would re dedicate herself to doing
Speaker 1: what she could do with real passion and talent, and
Speaker 1: that was often writing. You know, you said that after
Speaker 1: the election, you were just so eager to write about,
Speaker 1: you know, some of the early pioneering women and what
Speaker 1: they were able to achieve despite challenges. And I wonder
Speaker 1: what lessons you take from her life, because clearly she's
Speaker 1: a most fascinating figure. Yes, thank you for that question.
Speaker 1: I love thinking about that. As as I've said, I'm
Speaker 1: actually a philosopher, and I teach moral philosophy. Be so
Speaker 1: I think a lot about the moral questions, the big
Speaker 1: moral questions in our lives, and I like to think
Speaker 1: about how I want to live my own life and
Speaker 1: how I can learn from Child's life how to live
Speaker 1: my own. One of the things that I admire the
Speaker 1: most about her is she had a kind of fierce humility.
Speaker 1: So she knew that she could be part of the problem.
Speaker 1: She knew that white people and that white Northerners, and
Speaker 1: that white women often got in the way of racial progress,
Speaker 1: and she knew that change had to start with her,
Speaker 1: and that if she just kept pointing at the South
Speaker 1: and saying, oh, well, if they would just change, everything
Speaker 1: would be better, she wouldn't be actually fixing what she
Speaker 1: could fix, which was her own behavior. So I think
Speaker 1: I've learned a lot about that from her, about listening
Speaker 1: and trying to be humble, and being more aware of
Speaker 1: ways in which um I might be contributing to even
Speaker 1: the problems that I care most about. And I also
Speaker 1: think that reading about Child's life has triggered in me
Speaker 1: what I sometimes call moral paranoia, by which I just
Speaker 1: mean if Child was operating in her early twenties as
Speaker 1: a well meaning woman who thought of herself as progressive
Speaker 1: and compassionate, and yet was missing some of these major
Speaker 1: truths about the treatment of Native Americans and also about enslavement,
Speaker 1: then what am I missing? What are the moral problems
Speaker 1: that are staring me in the face but that I
Speaker 1: am blind to. I think mass incarceration is one that
Speaker 1: I think about a lot, as a problem that's very
Speaker 1: hidden to most of us, but that has many of
Speaker 1: the same hallmarks of moral atrocity that slavery did um
Speaker 1: and climate change is another one that think way too
Speaker 1: many of us are willing to um be lulled back
Speaker 1: into complacency by arguments that we know are bad. And
Speaker 1: I think Child was so good at diagnosing, essentially saying,
Speaker 1: I can see that you know that something's wrong here. Now,
Speaker 1: let us think together about what better arguments we can
Speaker 1: make about how we need to change our lives. You know,
Speaker 1: you not only have introduced us to a truly remarkable
Speaker 1: person in our nation's history, Lydia Maria Child, but you
Speaker 1: have given us some very profound questions to think about
Speaker 1: as well for our own lives. And I can't thank
Speaker 1: you enough for this wonderful conversation. Thank you so much,
Speaker 1: Lydia Moland. Thank you, it's been a pleasure to speak
Speaker 1: with you. Lydia Maria Child is truly an incredible figure
Speaker 1: in a mirror Rican history. Here are three things I
Speaker 1: took from that conversation. First, what an example of courage.
Speaker 1: Lydia Mariah Child had it all, respect, popularity as an author,
Speaker 1: great sales, and gave it all up to speak out
Speaker 1: about the injustice of slavery. Second, Mariah Child was able
Speaker 1: to accomplish so much partly because she knew her own
Speaker 1: strengths and weaknesses. She turned down committee work on abolition,
Speaker 1: even though she realized it was important, because it would
Speaker 1: sap her energy from her most impactful work writing. Finally,
Speaker 1: as Lydia Molin tells us, Mariah Child's example invites us
Speaker 1: to look at our own lives before we try to
Speaker 1: change the world. What are our blind spots and what
Speaker 1: can we fix within ourselves that maybe attributing to the
Speaker 1: larger problem. To learn more about this nineteenth century powerhouse,
Speaker 1: check out the book Lydia Mariah Child, A Radical American Life,
Speaker 1: and tune in next time to hear about our next
Speaker 1: featured woman and discover why she's one of Seneca's one
Speaker 1: Women to Hear. Seneca's one hundred Women to Hear is
Speaker 1: a collaboration between the Seneca Women Podcast Network and I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, with support from founding partner Pung. Have a
Speaker 1: Great Day,