Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life
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Lydia Maria Child is best known at Kitchen Arts & Letters as the author of the influential 1829 work The American Frugal Housewife, one of the first nationally important cookbooks and household manuals.
But as this 500+ page biography reminds us, she was also a pioneering abolitionist and an advocate for women’s suffrage whose pursuit of important principles cost her dearly.
A professor of philosophy, Lydia Moland began investigating the life of Lydia Maria Child as a way of asking what it meant to respond to injustice at the risk to one’s own happiness, prosperity, and place in society.
Thankfully, much of Child’s correspondence has survived and we hear from her often, a lucid stylist with an eye for detail and the ability to come quickly, powerfully to the point. She was passionate about what she believed but also able to accept ambiguity in human emotions, perhaps more often in others than herself.
This is a compelling account, effectively set within the context of nineteenth-century American life in a way that makes its relevance today clear.
Paperback. Black-and-white photographs throughout. 568 pages.
Published: July 12, 2024