The Philosophical Activism of Lydia Maria Child

In 1846, a reviewer for the Southern Quarterly Review was evaluating the writings of one of the United States’ most prolific authors, a woman named Lydia Maria Child. After appraising Child’s extensive output, which ranged from political treatises to self-help books to novels and poetry, the reviewer made a striking pronouncement. “Mrs. Child disclaims the character of a philosopher, but she knows how to teach the art of living well, which is certainly the highest wisdom.”

The first time I read this, it made me pause. I discovered Child when, looking for a project in nineteenth-century philosophy that involved women, I followed the vague intuition that anyone devoted to a lifetime of social activism and reform would have to do some philosophizing. They would, I imagined, have to think carefully about issues of justice, equality, human nature, and progress in history. Professional female philosophers in the nineteenth century were rare. Female activists were not. What kind of philosophical thinking had such women done?

Child certainly meets the activist criteria. In 1833, she authored the country’s first book-length condemnation of slavery: a book so progressive in its commitment to immediate emancipation and racial equality that she was ostracized from Boston society. Undaunted, she spent the next thirty years arguing against slavery in every venue imaginable, calling Americans to live according to the principles of freedom and equality they already professed to have. She later used her formidable reputation to denounce the forced removal of Native Americans, the stigmatization of prostitutes, and the lack of women’s suffrage. A gifted fiction writer, she composed literature that powerfully conveyed her ethical commitments. She lived as she wrote, matching principles with engagement. She aided fugitive slaves, shielded fellow abolitionists from mobs, collected money and books for newly freed slaves, and knitted hats for soldiers during the Civil War. She mentored African-American authors and provided housing for “fallen” women. Her life is a testament to principles of justice employed in everyday action.

She meets the criteria for philosophical thought, too. Child was from a working-class family that did not value education, especially for girls. But she was a voracious reader with an older brother who fostered her intellect and loaned her his books. As a fifteen-year-old, she was arguing with him about interpretations of Milton; by seventeen, she was reading Gibbon, Shakespeare, and Samuel Johnson. It wasn’t long before she was reading philosophy. She reports that reading Herder in her youth cooled her enthusiasm for a suiter whose philosophical skills she found lacking.  In 1825, she and Margaret Fuller, who went on to be another of the American 19^th century’s most prominent female intellectuals, convened a study group in which they read John Locke and the French intellectual Germaine de Staël.  Staël was herself both a highly successful novelist and philosophical thinker, the author of several works on political theory, moral psychology, and aesthetics.  Child went on to write a biography of Staël in which she particularly praises her On Germany, a work widely credited with introducing a broader public to philosophers such as Kant, Jacobi, Fichte, and Schelling.  

Child’s philosophical interests continued into her professional life. In 1841, on the strength of her abolitionist background and literary credentials, Child became the general editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, a periodical devoted to the abolitionist cause. Here Child presented relevant news about the movement, from legislative developments in Congress, to reports of barbarism against slaves in the South, to reprehensibly racist behavior in the North. Perhaps to the surprise of her readers, Child also made frequent references to German philosophy, quoting, for instance, Herder, Jean Paul, Novalis, Lessing, and August Wilhelm Schlegel. In a popular series of essays she called “Letters from New York,” also included in the Standard, Child showed a deep affinity with a kind of Romantic-Spinozistic image of the spiritual in the natural world, praising Herder (via a quote from Jean Paul) as someone who “dwelt with the great of all ages, yet with a divine Spinozism of the heart, loved the humblest reptile, the meanest insect, and every blossom in the woods” (204). The great injustices of society, she suggests throughout these writings, reflected humans’ inability to see this unity and to conceptualize themselves as one with each other and nature around them. Reform—including the end of slavery—would happen when humans instead viewed themselves as part of nature and connected to each other.

Her letters are also full of philosophizing. “I dare say this all sounds very crude to you,” Child writes to her brother, by then a theology professor at Harvard, after a particularly abstract chain of reasoning: “for I never had any faculty at metaphysics.” But she follows this disclaimer with more metaphysical musings: “I can only say that things reasoned about seem to me like the visible, tangible objects of this world; and things imparted to the imaginative faculty seem like the divine realities, the Creative Ideas, in Plato’s ethereal world of intelligences. All the very highest truths are not cognizable by reason; are they?” (Collected Correspondence 892).

To other friends, she speculated about a question that had vexed many philosophers of the previous century, namely whether there was progress in history.  This was not an abstract question to abolitionists like Child as they struggled to ascertain whether an evil like slavery could be eradicated.  She eagerly read Henry Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilization in England, a major attempt to pronounce on this topic, then gave her qualified approval. “Buckle says truly,” she wrote to a friend, “that intellect grows continually, while moral principles are precisely the same as they were thousands of years ago.” But Child was not content with Buckle’s judgment that intellect was the engine of human progress. “[I]ntellect,” she instead concluded, “is excited to action by moral feeling.” “Slavery was abolished in England by rousing the moral feelings of the people; and under that stimulus, they collected facts to convince the intellect,” she claimed. Hegel, she thought, had come closer to the truth on this question. “It seems to me that Hegel, in his Philosophy of History uses a better word [than intellect],” she decided. “He calls the motive-power of the universe spirit.” The designation spirit was superior, she explained, “because it includes both moral and intellectual influences, which surely always move together in human progress” (Collected Correspondence 1101, 1099).

All of this evidence suggests a woman of philosophical temperament, interest, and education, however informal. They why “disclaim the character of a philosopher”? With her formidable intellectual talents, passion for justice, and love of thought, why would Child go out of her way to distance herself from philosophy?

One answer is evident in her description of her encounter with William Lloyd Garrison, the path-breaking, fire-breathing abolitionist who converted her to the cause while she was still in her twenties. Later in life, she described the incident: she was, she tells us,

then all absorbed in poetry and painting—soaring aloft, on Psyche-wings, into the ethereal regions of mysticism. [Garrison] got hold of the strings of my conscience, and pulled me into Reforms. It is of no use to imagine what might have been, if I had never met him. Old dreams vanished, old associates departed, and all things became new . . . A new stimulus seized my whole being, and carried me whithersoever it would. ‘I could not otherwise, so help me God.’

(SELECTED LETTERS 558)

In other words, Child’s intellectual pursuits were interrupted by moral urgency: by the call to rid her country of slavery. This should make us pause, too. Why did Child think the “ethereal regions” of thought were incompatible with the pursuit of justice? Why did activism preclude philosophy?

Perhaps the answer lies in considering who counted as a philosopher in Child’s generation and what those people were doing—or not—especially as regards slavery. In 1843, Ralph Waldo Emerson was giving a course of lectures in New York, where Child was editing the National Anti-Slavery Standard. In his lectures, Child writes, Emerson gave “a glowing and graceful picture of Southern manners” without making “the least allusion to any bad effects.” “Speaking of the discrepancies between our professions and our practices, as a people, he did not allude to slavery,” Child complained to a friend. “I cannot think that this is manly and true; for the subject must occur to him” (Selected Letters 189). Emerson would come to denounce slavery later, but not soon enough to convince Child of his moral judgment. In Child’s experience, then, formal philosophy was associated with a lack of engagement in the most pressing issues of justice.  She felt called to choose the latter over the former.

She also sometimes found philosophy, and philosophers, obscure and obfuscating. In the fall of 1843, she attended lectures in New York given by Bronson Alcott, the arch-transcendentalist who was undertaking a utopian living experiment in Harvard, Massachusetts. She left within minutes, “knowing that I should pay the penalty of a severe head-ache, if I remained half an hour,” she reported to a friend.  Child asked Alcott himself why he had come to New York. “I don’t know,” replied Alcott: and, Child suggested, “I believe he left the citizens as little enlightened as himself.” When Emerson sent her a copy of his Essays, Second Series, she wrote to another friend that “it takes away my strength, and makes me uncertain whether to hang myself or my gown over a chair” (Selected Letters 203, 216).

Some of her reasons for disclaiming philosophy, then, are unfortunately familiar. She distrusted the detachment and abstraction that, then as now, often characterize philosophy when narrowly understood. Probably she was also self-conscious about her limited formal education, understanding all too well that philosophy considered itself a realm of thought inaccessible to women.

But examples like Child’s give us another vision of what philosophical thought can be and do. In devoting herself to a lifetime of activism, Child devoted herself to thinking philosophically. She drew actively from philosophical thought around her, and she applied it to herself and her world. She was an uncompromising examiner of her own conduct, holding herself to principles she also thoroughly examined. She was a relentless critic of her fellow citizens’ bad reasoning and hypocrisy. Her wonder at the world—her desire to determine what history meant, what justice was, how humans related to nature—never faltered. In a lifetime of writing for her fellow Americans, she called them to a similar combination of wonder, rigor, and integrity. Insofar as she taught others “the art of living well”—as the Southern Review Quarterly put it—by asking them to cultivate these intellectual habits, she articulated a wider, richer definition of philosophy: one that no intelligent, engaged woman would need to disclaim.  

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott Associate Editor Julinna Oxley.

Lydia Moland

Lydia Moland is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.  She has published extensively on Hegel and German Idealism, including Hegel’s Aesthetics: The Art of Idealism (Oxford, 2019).  She is currently writing a biography of the American abolitionist Lydia Maria Child (forthcoming from University of Chicago Press) and is co-editing, together with Alison Stone, The Oxford Handbook of American and British Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century.