Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) began her career almost two centuries ago, and some of her writing is dated, yet some resonates today in odd ways. She address the contradiction in American society as to whether to conserve of consume with her association of ideas. Child also offered this thought: The United States is a warning rather than en example to the world." This odd group including a bird, bees, a squirrel, a whale, a wax doll, and a horse appeared in "Fanny's Menagerie," Rainbows for Children (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1847): 119-131. Design by Meredith Eliassen, 2018.
Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) began her career during the 1820s, and was well established as a prominent social activist by the 1860s. Her longevity as a writer (55 years) placed her intellectually between the changing democratic antebellum order of the Second Great Awakening and Transcendentalism in post-bellum cultural reforms. Child's career was well in advance of other activists who sought increased moral political input related to family stability such as the abolition of slavery (1830-1860), child labor reform (1870-1930), child welfare (1890-1930) and women's suffrage (1900-1920). She was an untiring proponent for the rights of Native Americans and the humane treatment of animals first within the genre of prescriptive literature that shaped women's everyday lives and then within broader literary genres where a dichotomy emerged between the two didactic genres in relation to a movement to start animal protection societies in the United States.