Brief Biography of Marie Child
Maria Child
Brief Biography
Born in Medford, Massachusetts on February 11, 1802, Lydia Maria Child was born to a relatively well to do family. She received her education from women’s schools and her brother, Convers Francis, who studied at Harvard and became a Unitarian minister. Initially, she pursued becoming a teacher, but after moving to Boston with her husband David in 1828, she began writing. Her early writings mostly focus on the role of mothers in society and their challenges and struggles in the role they have been forced into. Maria Child wrote that her early works, such as The Frugal American Housewife, were meant for the poor and others who could not afford the consultation of doctors and other services which were often exclusive to the higher classes. Her first works in the abolitionist movement appear in the early 1830s, and continue to appear throughout the remainder of her writing career. Her abolitionist writings are split into two main categories: moral treatises on the immorality and base wrongness of slavery, and short stories which demonstrated these problems, often written from the point of view of slaves themselves. Child became well known for her works, and her activism continued until the Civil War, during which attention to activists works and movements was replaced with the focus on the war. However, the America which would emerge from the Civil war, with slavery abolished and suffrage on the horizon, would owe its new order in no small part to writers like Lydia Maria Child.