• She founded and edited the first magazine for childrenin

theUnited States, Juvenile Miscellany.She published a second

novelin 1825,The Rebels;or,Boston Before the Revolution, about
the agitation over the StampTax.
• Partly for financial reasons, Lydia Maria Child began writing
practical advice books for women, such as The Mother’s Book
(1831) and The American Frugal Housewife (1831).
• Along with general maxims on health and housekeeping, and
an emphasis on thrift and economy that Benjamin Franklin
would have admired, the book strongly advises its women
readers to give their daughters a good general education.
• By 1833, Child had become actively involved in the abolitionist
movement. It was that year she published An Appealin Favor of
That Class of Americans Called Africans. Later, in 1839, she
published her Anti-Slavery Catechism, a pamphlet written in the
form of questions and answers.
• What both documents reveal is that Child was a moderate
abolitionist, Her aim was to persuade what she termed “our
brethren of the South” to reform themselves, to reconstruct the
slave system from within. This enabled her to admit that the North
did not hold a monopoly on virtue.
• Much the same could be said of many reformers of the time,
including the Grimke sisters, Angelina Grimke Weld (1805–1879)
and Sarah Moore Grimke (1792–1873). Born in South Carolina to a
slaveholding family, the sisters shocked their fellow Southerners
and relatives by identifying themselves with the abolitionist
movement. It was while both were living in Philadelphia that
Angelina wrote An Appeal to
• the Christian Women of the South (1836). “I am going to tell you
unwelcome truths,” she told her intended Southern white women
readers,“but I mean to speak those truth sin love.”Despite the
evidently modest, even apologetic beginning, the message of the
Appeal was radical
• Southern white women, Angelina argued, should read about slavery, pray
for the truth about slavery to be known, and not only speak out against
slavery but also act to eradicate it by freeing their own slaves.
• In this Appeal, the cause of abolition and the cause of feminism were
linked, not least because white Southern women were offered
thepossibility of affirming theirwomanhood, andtheircapacityfor significant
political action, in and through working towards the end of slavery.
• Angelina Grimke also wrote more directly about the feminist cause only a
year after theAppeal,in her Letters to Catharine Beecher. Humanity was
indivisible, the doctrines of liberty and equality had a universal application;
and woman should be regarded “as a companion, a co-worker, an equal” of
man not “a mere appendage of his being, an instrument of his convenience
and pleasure.”
• The Letters on the Equality of the Sexes are just as resistant as the Letters
to Catharine Beecher are to the idea that a woman’s place is necessarily in
the home.
• For Sarah, as for Angelina Grimke, then, female emancipation
and the abolition of slavery were intimately connected. The
connection between abolitionism and feminism in the
nineteenth century was not, however, always seamless. In 1840
a World Anti-Slavery Convention was held in England, and those
present decided on the first day not to seat women delegates.
• If Stanton, along with Margaret Fuller, was the philosopher of
the feminist movement in America during the nineteenth
century, then Fanny Fernwas one of those who translated
feminist principles into an enormously successful writing career.
• Over the following twenty years, her essays, articles, and other
writing for various journals , and collections such as Fresh
Leaves (1857), FollyasIt Flies(1868),and Ginger Snaps (1870)
were to establish her as one of the most famous women writers
in the nation.
• The essays and articles written under the
name of Fanny Fern are generally marked by
alively, gossipy style, full of exclamations
Thereisplentyof sentiment, but there is also
plenty of wit. There are also articles that deal
in a more openly serious way with the plight
of women. Fern drew heavily on her own
experiences in the book.
 Of Sojourner Truth (1793?–1883), someone wrote in
1881 that she “combined in herself, as an individual,
the two most hated elements of humanity. She was
black and she was a woman.
• She never learned to read or write
• She had five children from herunion with another slave,saw one
ofher childrens old away from her,then fled with another of her
children in 1826, so seizing her freedom one year before she was
formallyemancipatedunderaNewYorklawpassedin1827.
• In 1875 the Narrative was reprinted with a supplement
calledtheBookofLife,containing personal correspondence,
newspaper accounts ofher activities,and tributes from herfriends
• In1843she received what she termed a summons from God,
commanding her to go out and preach. She changed
hernametoreflecthernewidentity,asatravelerdedicatedtotellingpeo
plewhatistrue, andshe took to the road
 African American writing

• By contrast to Sojourner Truth,who never wrote

down a single one of the speechesfor which she is
remembered, Frances E. W. Harper (1825–1911) was
one of the most prolific,a swell aspopular,African
American writer sof the nineteen thcentury
• In 1859 Harper published her first significant fiction,
the short stories “The Two
Offers”and“OurGreatestWant.”“TheTwoOffers,”thefir
stshortstorypublishedby a black person in the United
States, is concerned with the condition of women.
• Both stories are characteristic, in that they are elaborately
artificial in tone and sternly moral in tenor; and, together,
they reflect the overriding commitments of Harper’s life and
work: to racial and sexual equality.
• Harper made an important contribution to African American
writing; she was not, however, the first African American to
publish a novel or longer fiction. In March, 1853, Frederick
Douglass published his novella, The Heroic Slave, in his
paper The NorthStar.
• TwoothernovelsbyAfricanAmericanstoappearbeforetheCivil
WarwereBlake;or, The Huts of America and Our Nig or,
Sketches from the Life of A free Black,inaTwo-Story White
House, North. Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even
There (1859).
• in the American grain. “I am for war – war against
whites,” the hero tells his allies, while insisting that
they should resist amalgamation, reject life in the
United States, and return to their African homeland.
• OurNigisverydifferent.ThefirstpublishednovelbyanAfri
canAmericanwoman,it is also the first in black
American literature to examine the life of an ordinary
black person in detail.
• .Not only asentimental novel,it is also are a list one.It
focuses not so much on moments of particular
brutality, as on the bitter daily burden of black toil
and white indifference and spite.