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To all you members of the brigade, our lamplight love still burns strong.
It all begins and ends where the students' lamp has shown and they're alone.
We've talked a lot about Amor Mundi and lamplight love on entitled opinions of late.
Today we're going to talk about an important form that Amor Mundi takes or
sometimes fails to take in the modern era.
Namely, love of country.
And in particular, love of the country called the United States of America.
And even more particularly, the form that love of country took for
a 19th century new Englander who loved a country that was not in reality,
the country she lived in.
Who loved a country that had not yet been born into its new birth of freedom.
In some, a country that declared one thing and countenance to another.
Some people take declarations more seriously than others.
And the protagonist of today's show was what you might call a declarative American.
By which I mean an American who holds such truths to be self-evident.
Stay tuned, a show on the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child coming up.
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I wish I could say as I usually do that my guest joins me in the studios of KZSU.
But this is one of our exceptional shows at least since the end of the lockdown,
where our conversation will be taking place remotely.
My guest Lydia Mulland is dialed in from Maine while I'm here on the other coast of this sprawling
North American continent.
We're 12 score and 17 years ago.
Our father's brought forth a new nation conceived in liberty.
And if you believe a bran Lincoln dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Lydia Mulland is a philosopher who teaches at Colby College.
She's the author of two books on Hegel and editor of another book on the philosophy of humor in the 19th century.
And as of last year, she's also the author of a 600 page biography of someone whom she first became aware of in 2016.
When she was rummaging through a box of archived letters in the Slesinger library for the history of women in America at the Radcliffe Institute.
That box contained a letter that made a strong impression on her. It was signed L Maria Child.
She had no idea who that was.
But now, five years later, she knows more about her namesake Lydia Child than probably anyone alive.
Lydia Mulland, welcome to entitled opinions.
Thank you so much Robert. And for that wonderful introduction, it's a real honor to be with you today.
Well, I'm glad that we could do this at a distance.
Your biography came out in 2022 with the University of Chicago Press, my own publisher, I might add.
Under the title, Lydia Maria Child, a radical American life, and it was indeed quite a radical life.
Yet before we talk about Lydia Child, two questions for you.
What had brought you to the Slesinger library back in 2016?
And what was it about that letter that caught your attention?
Yes, thank you for that. It's one of the most serendipitous and delightful stories in my scholarly career for sure.
It was 2016 and like a lot of Americans, I was shocked and more shocked than I should have been.
And also very dismayed at the direction the country was taking after the 2016 election.
And as you mentioned, I'd spent my entire career up until that point in writing about German philosophy and always writing about men.
And I woke up the day after the election and I thought, that's it. I can't keep doing things the same way I had been doing them.
I need to find a different way to address my scholarly career as well as other parts of my life.
And I decided to turn back to my own country to learn something about the United States and I decided I wanted to write about women.
And I had this idea that I wanted to write about a woman who had faced a moral emergency in her country in the United States.
And I had a very distant memory probably from junior high that a women had been an important part of the abolitionist movement to end enslavement in the United States.
In the 19th century, so I know quite a bit about the 19th century and I thought, well, maybe I can leverage that knowledge into writing about such a woman if I could find her.
So I literally went to this lesson to your library and you said and talked to the very helpful librarians there and said, I would like to find a woman who used philosophy to fight slavery in the United States.
And they said, well, we don't know of any such women in particular, but there happened to be a box of letters that someone else had called out to look at that day and they said these are 19th century abolitionists, you want to look at the boulder.
So I did.
And there were several names I recognized in there from Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Kate Stanton and Louisa May Alcott.
But there was this one letter, as you say, that just electrified me. It was clearly written from one activist to another and it was a response to the first activists requesting help with a particular political resistant action.
And the author of this letter was self deprecating. It was funny, but it was very principled and very generous and also very clearly saying this is not an action I think I can support.
And you might remember in those early months, this was now in 2017, a lot of us were just trying to figure out what do we do.
So I did the mission in March and the streets and right to your legislator, it was just hard to know what to do. And this clearly was a letter of by someone who thought very hard about that question.
I got to the letter, as you say, there was the signature. I didn't know who she was. I have to admit I had to Google her. And what I saw was just life changing for me in part because I couldn't believe everything she'd done and that I'd never heard of her.
So I'm sure we'll get into lots of these details, but she was very early on. One of the United States first self sufficient female authors. She was a novelist. She wrote a very important self help book that was very popular among American housewives.
She was an editor of a very popular children's periodical. She wrote one of the first book length denunciations of slavery after converting to abolitionism in the 1830s.
And then that launched a whole career in which she was one of the abolitionists movements, most powerful writers.
But she also wrote a two volume history of women, a three volume history of religion. She wrote books about nursing and about aging. She wrote more novels. She wrote more children's stories. She wrote in favor of Native Americans and her last publication was a plea for racial and religious tolerance.
So she her writing stands an incredibly rich part of 19th century American history and she was present for pretty much all of its major questions and movements.
She really was tired as when it came to writing. I can't believe how much she actually wrote and how many causes she really embraced and I'd like to explore with you as you know one step at a time.
What I dimly perceived to be the coherence of her position, moral ethical, perhaps even philosophical.
I think it might be the center of gravity might be the notion that there's a patriarchy in America or a kind of male dominance both of women.
And of course of the slaves and that they derive from the same source. So she was I think if not as passionate, almost as passionate in her defense of women's rights as she was.
And she was more comfortable advocating for the rights of others than for her own.
And it was really when it became clear that without advocating for women's rights, she was not going to be allowed to advocate for the end of slavery that I think your right, she really began to focus on how destructive a patriarchy could be at silencing half of its population.
And then later in her career, she certainly embraced women's rights as we now understand it and work with people like Palestine and more just elite people like Elizabeth Katie Stanton for the vote.
And as you mentioned as well, the Native American rights and I guess I want to provoke you into agreeing that perhaps the philosophical principle on which all this activism was based is the Declaration of Independence and the notion that we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal.
And that sort of equality includes men of all races that includes the women of the human race and Native Americans and so forth.
And as you say in your book, there's she was one of these people who somehow took the principle of equality to heart and could not forget as many of us tend to do when we see an injustice being committed that we have a moral objection but then somehow we kind of bracket it and get on with our lies and she was one of those few who just could not forget her witness of the
in terms of.
Yeah, I think that's beautifully put and I love the way frame that in the introduction to that she was a passionate citizen of a country that didn't even quite exist, and that she continued to feel
to need to call her fellow citizens to helping bring it into existence. And you're absolutely right, even that early, right, so her parents were alive during the Revolutionary War. They were children, but she, she was the child of people who had seen that revolutionary war succeed.
And for her, I think it was already stunning how quickly Americans had forgotten the radically nature of those documents and how many people were willing to say, well, yes, but we do believe all humans are equal, but, and then there would come this kind of endless list of pretty bad arguments that would keep people from actually seeing and acknowledging and most importantly,
acting on that. So one of the things I think she was most brilliant at, and I think this is very philosophical of her, is identifying those bad arguments and could have meaning people where they were and saying, okay, you, you know, and all humans are equal, but you're willing to continue saying, well,
probably slavery is bad, but there are all of these reasons it needs to continue. Okay, let's pick those reasons apart and see how quickly they dissolve into very easily reputable arguments so that we can get down to this bedrock radical commitment about equality. And I think it was a fairly effective argument and a tactic on her part.
You know, I've often believed that America had at least two births, one was the birth of its mind and the other of its body. This is very simplified, but you know what I mean, it's the idea of what the ideals on the one hand, the disembodied abstract principles and then the actual messy, dirty and empirical realities that you face, and how does the body of the nation actually,
make its way into conformation with, you know, with its founding principle that you know, I've mentioned this before and entitled opinions that America might be the only nation that I know of, which is born of an idea.
I'm sure someone might write to me and say that's not true. There's a number of other nations that are born out of ideas, but it clearly is, you know, a concept that we are still to this day living in our contemporary history, the attempt of America to be what is often, you know, called a more perfect union if it's become a hackneyed phrase, but that more perfect union is some.
So when it comes to Lydia Maria Child, she paid, she, as you mentioned, she was a very successful woman author and had a flourishing, you know, literary career when she wrote the frugal housewife, I want to spend a moment talking about that book that she wrote the frugal housewife.
It sounds like it might be, you know, one of these typical 19th century woman books to write, which is giving advice to housewives and a lot of recipes and so forth, but it is a book about economy.
And it's about how you don't have to spend a ton of money to get, you know, the quality. I'm wondering how you might relate that to Thoreau's Walden, which is whose first chapter is really called economy.
The whole book is trying to show his fellow Americans that the promise of America, the freedom, the land, the seas, the skies, the waters, this whole promise is available essentially for free and that you don't have to enslave yourself to enrichment in order to enjoy the promise of America itself.
And something about frugality seems to have a sympathy.
Definitely.
Yes, a trial published this book that was called the frugal housewife, and the subtitle which I love is dedicated to those who are not ashamed of economy.
So there's a direct connection to Thoreau, right, economy, and in China's mind that really had to do with trying to remind Americans that they had just fought a war to try to rid themselves of the influence of an aristocracy.
And in an aristocracy, you always, if you were in the ruling class paid others to do your work, to do your cooking and your cleaning and household chores.
And so what child is trying to do is remind Americans that if we actually want to establish a Republican and democracy, we're going to need to know how to do those things ourselves.
And we're also going to need not to buy into a kind of consumerist society in which we make money only to spend it on frivolous things.
So she's very clear that there are other self-help books, but they're written for the upper classes.
So she says this is the first book for Americans that has been written for the poor.
And then she goes through all of these wonderful recipes about how to get rid of bed bugs or how to stuff a goose, a roast a pig.
She says at one point, beer is a good family drink because the water quality wasn't always very good.
And then at the certain point, sometimes imagine an American woman flipping through this trying to find a recipe for pies.
And instead coming across a passage where child says, how are we ever going to be the country we aspire to be if we don't know how to make our own soap?
The great scourge of this country is consumption of too many frivolous things.
So it's almost like she's trying to weave in these political principles to very practical and body behavior that she's trying to make Americans feel proud of.
Not just a apologize for, but to look to a country like England and say, we don't do things that way because we want to be self-reliant.
And of course, that was part of her ongoing argument with slavery as well, is that it by definition was a way to make other people do your work for you.
Well, not only to do the work, but it was also as you're suggesting it was a way to enrich the nation and enrich the households that were profiting from it because slavery was really the foundation.
It's the basis for the great enrichment of the United States as it was at the time.
And all those arguments that people would use against abolition.
Sometimes they read almost like allegories because the truth is that what it's going to happen to us if we abolish slavery and our economy is going to go down the tubes.
And this is a thing of another kind of constant vice of this nation of ours is the opposite of frugality, which is a curtain certain kind of materialist greed.
It takes the form of capitalism and in our day and age aggravated capitalism where the highest value is economic wealth.
And it seems to me that there is this strong political engagement with what is the nation capitalism of a country.
And so we're going to go to the road asking, you know, what direction do we want to go? Do we want to become enslaved to our own material greed, you know, and consumerist greed and so forth or are going to look, you know, some kind of higher order of values. So indeed.
Absolutely. I think part of what she's always asking us to consider is, okay, people are being exploited for economic gain.
What kind of gain are we talking about if what it takes is enslaving human names so that we can have a certain kind of dresses or food or houses.
Those things are just not morally relevant. Right. That there's no excuse.
And I think we can ask ourselves the same thing today too. We know there are people who essentially live in enslaved conditions that produce a lot of the goods that we put in,
and I think, you know, I think that you're a good one.
And I think that you're a good one.
But that slavery is one issue.
The other is racism, because that's much more specific.
And it's--
I was reading--
I was rather on the one hand horrified
on the other hand, feeling a sense of liberation
because of the honesty of this guy who was--
when the state started seceding from the union
before the outbreak of the civil war,
they formed the confederation of the states of America.
And here, they had a Confederate vice president,
Alexander Stevens, who proclaimed
that the new government of the South,
I quote, "rests upon this great truth
that the Negro is not equal to the white man.
That slavery subordination to the superior race
is his natural and normal condition."
I think that's honest racism.
In the sense that it comes out and says,
this is the order of things as opposed
to the kind of more covert things where you're denying
the principle that is something that goes away
with the abolition of slavery.
No?
That's right.
And I think that the cornerstone speech
like that, anyone who denies the South was fighting the civil war
to protect and retain slavery,
needs to remember that the vice president said that.
But absolutely, and Charles was always very clear about that
in a way that many abolitionists were not.
So there were many white abolitionists in the North
who were very dedicated to the idea that slavery was evil
and should be eradicated, and that Africans should not
be enslaved.
But not enslaving them did not mean thinking of them as equal.
But it did not mean wanting them in your churches or your
schools or your stage coaches or your places of work.
And so it was entirely possible and unfortunately somewhat
common for abolitionists to be fairly vicious racists
themselves.
And, child saw that danger very early on.
She herself was very early convinced
that the equality of the races and argued for that throughout
her life.
But she was also very clear that unless Americans came around
to the moral evil of treating another race as inferior,
slavery would always reassert itself in another form.
And of course, as we know, it only took a matter of years
after the civil war for the black codes and the mass
of incarceration system to begin to replicate the system
of slavery as closely as possible.
So she was not perfect on this.
So she was also definitely an assimilationist.
She thought that the best thing for newly emancipated people,
for instance, was to become, as quote unquote,
respectable to white people as they could, which, as I say
in the book, I think, is so problematic in so many ways.
And also something that many people, white people,
have myself continue to think and preach, right?
That that-- so she didn't-- she wasn't perfect on that for sure.
But she did see the kind of fundamental evil of racism
as underlying slavery.
And she sometimes says, we created slavery
and slavery creates the prejudice.
And unless the prejudice goes away, slavery will never go away.
And I think, again, unfortunately history,
bears are out in a lot of ways.
Yeah, for sure.
So I want to ask about two incidents.
One is the famous Captain John Brown's raid
that took place where there was--
he was a fierce abolitionist.
And he took up arms to help people hostage there.
Well, it was almost like the Black Panthers in the '60s
who say that civil disobedience is not going to work.
You have to meet power with power.
And so it was really an armed uprising.
And she had a Lydia Child had a immense admiration
for John Brown.
But it put her in a bit of a quandary,
because she was also a pacifist.
And had to negotiate the ambiguities of what
stands for she going to take vis-a-vis either approving
or denouncing the use of arms in the abolitionist cause.
Yeah, this is a fascinating chapter in her life
in part because I think it shows her media savvy.
She was a kind of influencer before people
used that term.
And she had a really good sense of how to turn events
to the advantage of the abolitionist movement.
And this was a great example.
So yes, she was what was called a non-resistance abolitionist,
which meant that she didn't think that force
should be used to try to end slavery.
And that belief was linked to what we were just
talking about too, which was that she and others
like William Lloyd Garrison believed that if force was used
to end slavery instead of there being a kind of moral
conversion to slavery's evil, it would just reappear in another form.
But Bia, as it made John Brown took the other approach,
as you say.
And he said, this is a violent system that
will only end through violence.
So he and a group of men, including several black men,
invaded as it were the federal armory at Herbert's Ferry,
took hostages, killed several people.
And there was a--
it failed, ultimately.
And she was captured alive.
And so that people like Child in the position of trying
to decide whether to come out in support of him
or to denounce him for his violence.
And she absolutely decided to do the former.
So what she did, again, is kind of media Saudi way.
She wrote to the governor of Virginia
to ask permission to come in nurse Brown.
But you have to--
was very audacious.
This was a man who had just killed several Virginians,
white Virginians.
And she was a famous abolitionist.
Governor Wise knew who she was.
But he wrote back and said, OK, you know,
you can come and visit him if you need to.
And then he took the opportunity to lecture her a little bit.
And to say, by the way, things like this
are your fault because you have condensed people that slavery
is so evil that they feel like they need to kill people
to end it.
And then he published her letter and his reply in the newspaper.
Now, this was a terrible breach of confidentiality.
She hadn't given permission for this.
But she very quickly seized on it as an opportunity.
She wrote a scathing response and reply
that sends things like if John Brown had been
looking for an example of someone who murders
and commits a kind of treason and exploitation.
He should just look to the governor of Virginia.
It was very good at all of those things.
So anyway, it was a very explosive letter.
She published that in the newspaper.
That enraged another woman named Mrs. Mason,
who had attacked child again in the press, which
gave child another opportunity to reply.
And that one is even more scathing.
And it includes the line because the woman, Mrs. Mason,
had said women in the North don't even help poor women
when they're in labor.
And child wrote back something like,
I've never seen a woman who has not been
helped when she's in labor.
The only difference is when the baby is born,
we do not sell the babies.
And this is just people who are so grateful to her for having--
articulated in this kind of fire hose of rage and indignation
and frustration after decades of fighting for the abolitionist
cause that the whole thing was then published as a tract.
And it sold 300,000 copies, which was the 19th century equivalent
of going viral.
And I haven't been able to confront this,
but you sometimes see people speculating
about union soldiers carrying it with them
onto the battlefront as a way of reminding them
what they were fighting for.
In fact, I was a very vexed issue for them, for sure,
whether to continue to support violence,
even if they weren't themselves causing it.
But in that case, you certainly did.
Yeah, well, of course, that violence exploded in a big way
in the civil war.
And I want to talk about that in a minute.
But just very briefly, before we turned to the civil war,
the-- you have a chapter there on Harriet Jacobs.
Who was Harriet Jacobs?
And what was Lydia Child's involvement with him?
Yes, this is another way in which Child's Life intersects
and fascinating ways with stories that people might know
from that period.
So Harriet Jacobs was born and enslaved in North Carolina.
She was what we would now call sexually assaulted
and harassed by her in slavery from really the moment
she was a teenager.
She fled and escaped to the North at a certain point.
But not before having two children with another white man
who was not her in slavery, which is a detail that's
relevant, as you'll see in a moment.
She then got to the North and decided
to write her autobiography.
But she was very concerned that the fact that she had
had children with another white man whom she was obviously
not married would mean that white Northerners and white
abolitionists would not take her stories seriously
and would just consider her a tainted woman
and she would never get her story told.
And she finally found a publisher who said
that he would publish it, but only if Lydia Mariah Child
wrote the introduction to the book.
So it was a way of asking if famous abolitionists
to vet the story and to endorse it.
So Child did that very happily, I think,
and without missing a beat as far as what
it meant to tell a story of sexual exploitation
to an audience that was famously very
prudish about such things.
But any of your listeners who know anything
about this story will also know that Child's role in this story
has been severely criticized by scholars
because it does seem that she, Child,
took some fairly significant liberties
with Jacob's story.
So she didn't just treat the introduction.
She also became an editor, essentially.
And there are definitely ways in which she told her
to cut certain chapters, to add certain details,
to take out certain details.
And so people have worried that this is just another example
of a white woman co-opting a black woman's story
and not allowing her to tell it as she saw fit.
And I love this as a very painful example
of a white person's intentions, not always resulting
in a good effect.
I also think that the Child Hijayk of interest in mind
is a farcee knew Jacob's audience really well
and wanted it the book to be as accessible to them as possible.
So she was trying to get Jacob's to edit it in ways
that would be more palatable to a white audience.
But again, I don't need to remind anyone how problematic that
is.
So to me, it's just a really interesting example
for someone like myself to think about in what ways
if I'm engaging in civil justice and racial justice
work in what ways I want to avoid reproducing
my creative, right, right.
Well put, well put.
Finally here on the Civil War, where everything
culminates in a war that you can interpret
from different perspectives.
I remember Eduardo Grisaz, the Caribbean
theorist in philosopher and writer.
And I remember having lunch with him talking about the Civil
War when-- and he said they did not
engage the Civil War to end slavery.
They engaged it to save the union, which is quite interesting.
Nevertheless, it was the issue of slavery that
caused the sub-rents of the Southern States.
And now Lydia Maria Child lived through the Civil War.
And it was the ultimate decision
in the etymological sense of the word decision, which Lincoln
is so subtle about when he's giving the Gettysburg
address that here we're facing this great decision.
We're divided and we have to--
so on the one hand, yeah you could say the Civil War was
engaged in order to save the union of the United States.
Slavery was of course the main issue.
So where does Lydia Maria Child fit?
How does she position herself in the Civil War?
And what was her-- was there this disappointment
after the end of the Civil War that, yeah, OK,
the right cause, I mean the cause of anti-slavery one out
but has something fundamentally really changed
in the country?
Yeah, and I love that question because I think
Child really does give us a way of seeing the Civil War
that I anyway had not confronted before, which was first
of all I should say that she was a disunionist several years
before the war began, which is to say that she was among the
abolitionists who just said, look, the South is never going to
change, they're never going to give up slavery, the only way
for us to morally extricate ourselves from this is to secede.
Of course that came with its own complications
if the North secede then slavery could just grow unchecked,
but anyway, that was the position she took.
And then again as a pacifist once the war started,
she was confronted with the fashion, knew very well that Lincoln
would have ended the war in a second if the South had agreed
to come back.
And so she knew that unless the war went on long enough
to force Lincoln to emancipate the slaves, the war could end
without ending enslavement and therefore not accomplished the one
thing that in her mind made the violence justifiable.
So she was in this incredibly difficult position of not wanting
the violent solution, but once the war had started,
she wanted it to continue long enough for Lincoln to be forced
to emancipate the slaves.
And she had friends who had sons, including Robert Gould Shaw,
the famous leader of the Massachusetts 54th regiment who
were killed in the war, but she knew that if the secede
er, sorry, surrendered too quickly, slavery would continue.
So she continued to hope for the war to continue until emancipation
happened, then she was really cheering for the war to end.
And you're right that by the end of the war, she was very clear
that she knew it had not been fought for the right reasons, that many
northerners still did not want to think of it as a
war to end slavery, many white northerners, and that that meant again that many
of those problems would continue.
And I think she died fairly disappointed because she lived
long enough to see reconstruction fail and to see the
Ku Klux Klan gain in its political terrorism and to see that most white
northerners had again revived their bad arguments for not taking
any of it seriously and I think she knew very well that the promise of the
country that she loved so much was still in its future and not in its present.
So Lydia, you're a philosopher, you teach philosophy and you mentioned a
number of times Lydia Maria Child's arguments or picking apart other arguments.
Do you think she had the philosophers obsession with argumentation
and rest of your city? Yeah, actually, yeah, I think she
she was a very philosophical figure. She knew her philosophy,
she wrote a novel about Platonism. She's certainly, she knew
Kant and Hegel, she talked about their arguments, she
quoted other figures like Schlegel and Lessing and Novales and all kinds of German
thinkers. And yeah, I think one thing that really is philosophical
he potent about her, she was she was very attracted to consistency and
integrity in thought. And so she was very good at calling out people's
hypocrisy and trying to get them to see that if they believed a
be could not follow. And insofar as that is true of philosophers, which
it often is, she was definitely a philosophical thinker.
And I think in some ways, although I know she had read some
Kant, but I don't know that she had read enough of his moral philosophy to have
been influenced by him, but she would often say as
Kantians will say that the important thing is to do the right thing
and the consequences have to take care of themselves. So she would say duties are
ours, events are gods. You have to do what you know is right. And if that
means that the country falls apart, if that means that there's a slave
insurrection, if that you know, that is not your duty, your duty is to do the
right thing. And for all of her life, that right thing was to pursue
equality in every way possible. Well, you know, one could dispute
the wisdom of that principle. Yes, you could.
I'm I'm famously at the Galian and not a Kantians.
Right. So you believe that a lot of my career
disputing it actually. You believe in the cunning of reason?
No, I do not. Oh, you do not believe. Okay. Well, sometimes, you know,
always acting in the name of the moral principle can bring about catastrophic
events in history that cause so much human suffering
that I for one at this moment am not ready to embrace that
that form of rigid moral absolutism. Yeah. Going back to the question of her
and philosophy, she is a new ingelner. She's from Massachusetts, right in the
in the thick of transcendentalism. So we have Emerson,
the row and Margaret Fuller, who herself was somewhat of a philosopher, at
least, she was the editor of the dial for four years and it's a main
journal of transcendentalism, American transcendentalism. Was she on
friendly terms with Emerson, Margaret Fuller, the row or
what was her addition to these transcendentalists? Yes, I think there are three
different answers there. One is she and Margaret Fuller, new each other very
early and this is one of my favorite facts about her early life. She and Fuller
had a study group together on philosophy and they mostly read
Locke, but also German to stall and child luncheon, right, the biography of
to stall, who is more and more being taken seriously as a political
philosopher now. And so she and Fuller had a very intense friendship, very
early on. Child was quite a bit, I forget how many years, but significantly
older than Fuller, but clearly treated her as an intellectual equal and they're
wonderful letters between them just brimming with intellectual
energy. And then they they have a period, I think, I don't have evidence for this,
but I think it corresponded to child's conversion to abolitionism when
child became essentially a political radical and a kind of social
pariah. It's so important for us to remember that to be an abolitionist
also in Boston in the 1830s was essentially to be an
untouchably radical pariah. And I think that Fuller may have taken some
distance from child in those years because her sympathies weren't quite as
strongly aligned with that movement. But later when both Fuller and
Child were living in New York, they reunited their friendship and had a lovely
couple of years going to concerts together and reading things together.
And so I think their friendship really lasted for them until Fuller's
death. So that is a... I was in 1848 if I'm
remembered correctly. Of course Fuller in the meantime, having written
Woman in the 19th century, which is one of the great founding
tracks of the defense of women equality of women and the
very sympathetic with Lydia Maria Child's positions on
the domination of women by the male picture. Anyway, that's...
And building on Child's two-volving history of women that she had published in the 1830s.
So yeah, they collaborated in some ways even when they weren't
in touch as it were. And then I just briefly had said about Emerson, they knew
each other pretty much their whole adult lives. They were very friendly with
each other. There's very lovely correspondence between the two of them.
But Child was fairly impatient with Emerson's refusal to call out slavery
earlier than he did. So we now all know that after John Brown's raid, Emerson
really came out strongly against slavery. But until then he had been
and until the 1850 compromise in the Fugitive Slave Act, he had been fairly
lukewarm or at least hadn't presented his opinions in public.
And that to Child was very dispiriting. And Thoreau, I don't actually know that they ever met,
but we do know that Thoreau checked her novel, her platonic novel, out of the
Harpen Library and took notes. So he certainly... And that was her most
transcendentalist work, this novel called "Flufaean."
So she may well have been an influence on him that he never
directly acknowledged. Is that novel still imprint by any
interest? Not really. You have to get one of these kind of knock-off
additions from the internet. But I have read it and I've actually been
writing about its philosophy and its influence both from Plato and from
Emmanuel Swedenborg, who was another major influence on the trans
Nellist, including Emerson, who all Swedenborg one of the 12
representatives of the communities. So there will will parallels there as well.
So with your information, if I can read something in your own
communication to me before our conversation today that you
say that you suggest that maybe a child is more like a profit than a model,
someone we can hope to be galvanized by but not imitate
and that speaking in your own voice, I've been kicking around the thought that
puts her more in the company of people like Semon Vay, Rachel Carson, Greta
Thernberg, Ida B. Wells, Angela Davis, Bill McKibbin,
any number of such people, not all of them Americans of course,
whom we sometimes experience as diagnosing what we know is wrong with us and
also often resent for it. And that you're thinking maybe
even of writing a book on these kinds of people for maybe in your next project. So
she would figure prominently in that list of characters I imagine.
No? Yeah, I mean, I said that in part reflecting what
weavers have said to me, I've had several readers say things like,
I know I can never aspire to be like her. She just had a kind of moral clarity
and moral energy that most of us myself definitely included can't even really aspire to.
But we can hope to be influenced by and I think to me also it's important to raise the voices
of such people and to publicize their ideas even if we ourselves aren't able to achieve that kind
of example. And also I've been fascinated and a little amused by the number of
readers who've said to me that they're not sure they would have liked her and wanted to be
friends with her. And I think she could be, she was very warm and funny and friendly,
but she can come across as morally pure in a way that can feel just daunting.
Well, that's very, you know, Seamong Bay was much more extreme because Seamong Bay never even had that
other side of her character that was fearful and...
Even a doctor who attended her at her desk that she was in some difficult patient you never had.
Exactly. So well, I'm really heartened that your biography of child has received so much
very good attention positive reviews and a lot of readers because it certainly deserves it.
And I want to thank you again for coming on to entitled opinions to talk about this
book of yours and video Maria Child, a radical American life.
Thank you so much. It's been such an honor to speak to you and to have wonderful conversations.
I'll remind our listeners we've been speaking with Lydia Mullen from Colby College out there in Maine.
We'll get you back on entitled opinions at a future date.
I would love that. Thank you.
Okay. Thanks for listening. I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Bye bye.
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