The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child.

Reviewed by

Annette Kolodny University of Arizona 

Like a silent undertow, anxiety about race and racial mixing tugs at the narratives of most nineteenth-century canonical American writers, even when it seems not to be their subject. In 1826, James Fenimore Cooper daringly acknowledged the possibility of cross-racial romantic attraction in a subplot of Last of the Mohicans. But Cooper killed off his potential lovers - the Indian, Uncas, and Cora, the dark-haired heroine whose mother may herself have been of mixed blood - and allowed only a chorus of Indian maidens to hint at the possibility of the two finding one another again in some idealized afterlife. For the most part, by contrast, Nathaniel Hawthorne's fictions appear never to engage such concerns. And yet the young man who must resist "the Oriental ... beauty" of Rappacini's daughter in Hawthorne's much-anthologized 1844 short story is pointedly described as having "fair, regular features, and a glistening of gold among his ringlets." Unless the ubiquity of contemporary white anxieties about race is taken into account, how do we explain the repetition of such racially-inflected symbolic resonances in a story ostensibly about the excesses of scientific experimentation?

Almost alone among her white contemporaries, Lydia Mafia Child attempted to wrestle with the undertow, rejecting both Cooper's reticence and Hawthorne's nervous silence. Her 1824 novel Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times was the first American fiction to depict a consensual and consummated marriage between a white woman and a Native American. Written when she was only twenty-two, it was Child's first published work, and it presaged a lifetime of passionate engagement with the most divisive issues of her day. Hers was one of the earliest voices raised against Cherokee removal and in opposition to the Seminole War. She editorialized against the annexation of Texas. In her fiction, her essays, and her journalistic writings, Child turned a clear and honest eye on the "Indian question," the "woman question," class divisions and poverty, and - most especially - racism and slavery.

In 1833, just two years after abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison began publishing the Liberator and months before the American Anti-Slavery Society was established, Child entered the anti-slavery movement with her groundbreaking Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. As her biographer Carolyn Karcher notes, the Appeal was "remarkable for its detailed refutation of widely accepted racist beliefs," and "may rank as the most enduringly significant work in white anti-slavery archives. In its time," continues Karcher, "it not only proved instrumental in drawing women into anti-slavery activism - thereby contributing to a revolution in their status - but converted a formidable array of men who subsequently assumed leadership positions in the abolitionist camp and the Republican party."

In a richly nuanced and well-researched volume, Karcher offers a fully developed excavation of Child's complicated views of race, her growing abolitionist convictions, and her deep ambivalence about fratricidal struggle - committed, as she was, to peaceful alternatives. Yet, as the inevitability of war became apparent, Child wrote to a friend from the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society that, even as she regretted "civil war, I deliberately say even that is better than compromises of principle, at this momentous crisis." The woman who had tried so hard to sustain her pacifist sentiments found herself finally urging the Union troops onward to the battlefield in hopes that they would, as Karcher puts it, welcome "their black brothers into their ranks ... fighting shoulder to shoulder with them." Throughout the war, and despite her revulsion at its bloodshed, Child never wavered in her principled stance. As she explained in a letter to the New York Independent in August 1865, "I dreaded to have the war end before Slavery was completely overthrown, because I foresaw that, if it did, another bloody war must inevitably follow." Like Thomas Jefferson before her, Child understood that the Union was in jeopardy as long as slavery divided it. Unlike Jefferson, she further understood that, even when slavery was abolished, the fabric of the nation could still be undone by racism.

In a life that spanned almost the whole of the nineteenth century (18021880), Child wrote about and lived within controversy, becoming a "household name" when still relatively young. Her early popularity came from editing the first American children's periodical and publishing a best-selling domestic advice manual. But her fame and influence, Karcher persuades us, rested on her willingness to speak with an uncompromising voice about every major issue of her time. Despite this, until Karcher's articles about and editions of Child's works - and now this biography - Child's many achievements have been sorely neglected within American cultural and literary history. Karcher, a professor of American literature at Temple University, has responded to this sad omission by analyzing Child's voluminous output in thoughtful and contextualizing detail. As a result, Child's works may now enter the American literature and American Studies classrooms; and Child herself we may hope, will take her rightful place in literary and social history.

Readers who come to this large volume expecting only the biography of a single figure, however, underestimate what the book offers. To be sure, The First Woman in the Republic will stand for many years as the definitive biography of Child. More than that, though, it is a cultural biography of an entire century. In her analysis of Child's literary and political writings, for example, Karcher examines works by other contemporary authors. She thus anchors Child in a dense and complicated literary scene, establishing the ways in which she was unique among even such greats as Hawthorne, Emerson, and Melville. No less important, because Child's works and activism engaged all the major social and political movements of her day, this detailed study of her life necessarily also maps the entire social and political landscape of the nineteenth century. It stands, in effect, as a work of both biography and cultural history.

Because of Karcher's sensitive attention to the shaping emotional crises of her subject's life from her mother's illness and premature death to Child's troubled marriage Karcher helps us to get at the underlying motivations for this woman's courage, resourcefulness, and commitment to social justice. But can we ever really know why some individuals defy expectations and take on battles not obviously their own? In the case of Child, especially, no amount of biographical sleuthing can ever enable us fully to understand how it was that she came to champion the rights not only of women and the downtrodden but also immigrants, African Americans, and Native Americans. While Karcher obviously admires Child for these achievements, her admiration does not blind her to more complicated truths: Even though Child could overcome most of the prejudices and racially inflected ideologies of her era, nonetheless, as Karcher makes clear, she "would never succeed in formulating an ideal of human brotherhood that did not involve the absorption of other cultures into her own." Regrettable though this is - and Karcher deeply underscores this regret - we understand it, because Karcher weaves her subject into a set of historical circumstances that worked to repress such ideals. Karcher teaches us that Child was perhaps ahead of her time, but she was never out of her time. For students and scholars of American literature, American history, and American cultural studies, this is a volume to be cherished for its passion and its honesty.