The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child Carolyn L. Karcher Duke University 785 pp. $37.95 Review by Judith E. Harper Featured in BBR April 1995 How is it that Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880), the woman of whom William Lloyd Garrison declared, "It would not be easy to name another person who has made greater sacrifices in the cause of emancipation," is barely, if ever, mentioned in contemporary American histories? And why is her book An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, which was considered the most comprehensive antislavery book ever printed in America, and which was responsible for converting the brilliant abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips, pioneer of Unitarianism William Ellery Channing, and Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, known only to scholars of abolitionism? And despite recognition in her own time as a primary figure in nearly every literary, social and political reform movement of the mid-19th century, why has she languished in obscurity for over a century? Although there have been several biographies of Child since the 1960s, with very few exceptions, Child's literary works can only be found in the rare book rooms of university special collections. That a public figure of Child's stature should ever have been forgotten is baffling; that she has remained neglected for over a century, and in the midst of an intense revival of interest in 19th-century feminism, is a ludicrous irony. By writing this monumental "cultural biography" of Child, Carolyn Karcher states that she hopes to restore Child "to her rightful place in our literary canons and historical textbooks." In writing a "cultural biography," Karcher adds, she has "attempted to view nineteenth-century America through the window of Child's mind," a task Karcher accomplishes by "reconstructing the historical and cultural matrix" out of which Child's writings and political activism evolved. Karcher maintains that she had to deviate from the confines of traditional literary biography because "Child was much more than a literary woman." But it is not only Child's life that Karcher illuminates. By probing Child's literary innovations, her radical social vision and activism, and the response of the intellectual and political world of 19th-century New England to her activity, Karcher adds a vital dimension to scholarship of this period. As Karcher's dual examination of Child's life and her society ultimately yields a more comprehensive view of 19th-century New England, it also points to one reason why Child's works remain virtually unknown. Many 19th-century intellectuals still tend to be rigidly classified according to one intellectual or political movement with which they have been repetitively associated. Because of the immense range of Child's vision and interests, all attempts to categorize her fail, and because as she once admitted, "I am too distinctly and decidedly an individual," she is often overlooked. Unlike her 20th-century counterparts, 19th-century writers, thinkers and reformers were often involved in multiple movements simultaneously; Child, by no means an aberration in this regard, was associated with Swedenborgianism, Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, utopian socialism, abolitionism, spiritualism and feminism. While Karcher alludes to the significance of this characteristic, she fails to underscore the fact that fluidity was a defining and controlling feature of 19th-century intellectualism. Karcher attributes modern-day neglect of Child to the reductiveness of much of feminist historiography and literary criticism. She argues that although Child never wavered from her militant advocacy of women's rights, she has been ignored by feminist historians in part because unlike Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Grimké sisters and Susan B. Anthony, all of whom have figured prominently in feminist histories, Child refused to subordinate the fight to abolish slavery beneath the cause of women's rights. Child stuck fast to her view, "In toiling for the freedom of others, we shall find our own." Karcher emphasizes that as bitter as Child was about the "condition of women," she could not participate in a struggle that promised to deflect attention from the abolition of what she perceived as slavery's far graver evil, a cause for which Child suffered ostracism and the loss of her literary reputation and livelihood. Karcher's recreation of the rich cultural milieu of Child's era is sure-footed and copious. The personalities and relations that drove 35 years of abolitionism in Boston are well represented: Child's close friendship with kindred spirit Margaret Fuller, her dissatisfaction with Emerson's philosophical meanderings, her rifts with the fiery Garrison. But Karcher stumbles in her efforts to probe Child's psychology. Here, her analysis lacks authority and often is unsupported. In describing the deep depression Child suffered after her separation from her husband, David Lee Child (a time during which she consorted with two male companions) Karcher does not support her judgment that, "Psychologically, she (Child) would atone for her illicit passion through a series of sacrificial acts." Karcher also refers repeatedly to what she describes as David Child's "apparent sexual deficiency," a claim supported only by the most veiled and ambiguous of Child's Victorian euphemisms. Karcher quotes Child, "I sometimes wish that he (David) were more mercurial, and I was less so." These and Karcher's other psychoanalyses seem all the more out of place in a work that is otherwise scrupulously documented. Yet Karcher makes a powerful case for a resurrection of interest in Child, one that should result in reprints of her best-known works. In a review of Child's bestselling Letters from New York, Margaret Fuller wrote in 1843, "It is, really, a contribution to American literature, recording in a generous spirit, and with lively truth, the pulsations in one great center of the national existence..." Fuller could have been referring to any one of Child's literary or expostulary works. Judith E. Harper is currently at work on a book exploring the clash of Irish and native Yankee cultures in mid-19th-century Boston. Listening to the voices of Child's contemporaries and eavesdropping on her agreements and disagreements with them allows us to ascertain more accurately where she herself belongs in the spectrum of nineteenth-century opinion and what is distinctive in her oeuvre. More broadly, it allows us to see the formation of a culture as a dynamic social process. The dialogic method also serves to strike a balance between the opposing tendencies of biography and of cultural studies--the one celebrating the heroic individual, the other reducing all historical figures to quasiuniform products of a hegemonic ideology. From The First Woman in the Republic &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

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