In times when so many of us pull from closets and airs genealogies of white supremacist identities, it is worth reminding that many of us have genealogies in liberal social and political movements, including abolitionist one, here in America. Going through my old files from 20 years ago, when I worked on a large research project in 19th century British women’s history, I stumbled upon Lydia Marie Child. Though not a British woman but an American one, Lydia Child was a fascinating figure in an early feminist and abolitionist movement. She was the author of one of the first histories of women, “The History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations”, published in 1835, and an author of poems, novels, instructions for mothers, and housekeepers, and most of all anti-slavery publications, including “An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans” in which she demanded the immediate emancipation of the slaves without compensation to their owners. It was the first anti-slavery book per se published in the U.S., and the first publication of this kind written by a white woman. Researching for this book took Lydia Child 3 years. Child called the socio-economic and political system of the Antebellum South a “slavocracy.”
I was very happy to find a recording of a talk by the philosopher, Lydia Molan who wrote a book dedicated to this exceptional woman: “Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life.”
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