A History of American Literature

154 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865

depressing beyond my powers to describe.” She would have liked, in a way, to join in:

“I would very much have liked to shout too,” she recalled. But she could not; as she

put it, “it was a little too exciting for me.” The religious passion of the slaves, like

their human pain, was something beyond her either fully to understand or to share.

Abolitionism and feminism

The diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut are her one contribution to American literature,

but a substantial one. They illustrate just how much forms of writing often considered

to be outside the parameters of literature – among them, the sermon and lecture, the

diary and journal – form an integral, in fact central, part of the American tradition,

with its emphasis on the regulation and realization of the self. Another writer who

became interested in the condition of slaves and the condition of women, Lydia

Maria Child (1802–1880), was, by contrast with Chesnut, prolific in her output. And

her interests led her to become an abolitionist and, for a while, attract public censure.

Child first made her mark with a historical novel, Hobomok (1824), which dealt with

the relationship between a Puritan woman and a Native American man. It offers a

vision of interracial union that is closer to Catharine Maria Sedgwick, in its

suggestion that such unions are eminently possible, than it is to James Fenimore

Cooper. She founded and edited the first magazine for children in the United States,

Juvenile Miscellany. She published a second novel in 1825, The Rebels; or, Boston

Before the Revolution, about the agitation over the Stamp Tax. Then, in 1828, she

married David Lee Child, a prominent abolitionist but also an impractical man,

whom his wife had very often to support. Partly for financial reasons, Lydia Maria

Child began writing practical advice books for women, such as The Mother’s Book

(1831) and The American Frugal Housewife (1831). “Books of this kind have usually

been written for the wealthy,” Child wrote in the opening chapter of The American

Frugal Housewife; “I have written for the poor.” Along with general maxims on

health and housekeeping, and an emphasis on thrift and economy that Benjamin

Franklin would have admired, the book strongly advises its women readers to give

their daughters a good general education. “The greatest and most universal error is,

teaching girls to exaggerate the importance of getting married,” Child explains, “and

of course to place an undue importance upon the polite attentions of gentlemen.”

Child does, certainly, see marriage and the domestic role as the usual, even desirable

one for women, but she does not underestimate the importance of other skills and

talents, even for women who will only apply them to the domestic sphere.

By 1833 Child had become actively involved in the abolitionist movement. It was

that year she published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans.

Later, in 1839, she published her Anti-Slavery Catechism, a pamphlet written in the

form of questions and answers. What both documents reveal is that Child was a

moderate abolitionist, just as she was a moderate feminist, anxious to correct the

impression that as an activist, with strong social concerns, she might therefore be an

irresponsible and vituperative agitator. Her aim was to persuade what she termed

“our brethren of the South” to reform themselves, to reconstruct the slave system

GGray_c02.indd 154ray_c 02 .indd 154 8 8/1/2011 7:54:41 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 41 AM