Despite being warned by female acquaintances that no woman could expect to be regarded as a lady after writing a book, Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) became one of the first American women to earn an income from her writing. A prolific and talented author, she championed the rights of women, Native Americans and African Americans. Her words shaped history.

Child was the youngest of six children. Her father, Convers Francis, was a baker noted for his famous “Medford Crackers,” and her mother, Susannah, was a homemaker. From earliest childhood, she was precocious and fiercely independent with a passion for books and an affinity for the natural world—qualities that endured throughout her lifetime. Early on she decided to be called by her middle name, Maria.

Following her mother’s death when she was twelve, Child went to live with her sister in Norridgewock, Maine. Her experiences there would inform her first book, Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times, the story of an interracial marriage between a white woman and indigenous man. Considered the first New England historical novel, the book’s controversial content garnered mixed reviews, nevertheless she continued to write.

In the following ten years, Child published eleven books and founded and edited the country’s first children’s magazine, The Juvenile Miscellany. Many of her publications focused on motherhood and domestic endeavors, including the popular The American Frugal Housewife, which unlike earlier English and American advice and “cookery” books, appealed to lower-income American families without servants.

While her marriage to idealist David Lee Child, an influential journalist and lawyer, introduced her to the abolitionist causes which she would go on to champion in her writings, it also propelled her to continue to write, as he was financially unsuccessful. In 1833, Child published the book that would change her life, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans. The most comprehensive antislavery book ever published in America, it proved instrumental in convincing many Americans of the need for the abolition of slavery.

In the controversial book, both the North and South are blamed for the existence of slavery and Child called for the immediate eradication of all forms of racial discrimination while openly defending interracial marriage. She was attacked for her views and for being a woman who dared to comment on politics. Publishers rejected her; the Boston Athenaeum, where she was one of the only women given a private study, revoked her privileges; her book sales dropped.

Undeterred, Child continued the fight against slavery by publishing more books on the subject and editing The National Anti-Slavery Standard with her husband.

A founding member of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, Child authored The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, the first comparative history of women. She donated time and money to the suffrage movement, drafting a petition insisting Congress give men and women the right to vote through the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.

A household name in America for more than half a century, Child’s writings influenced prominent social reformers, profoundly inspiring William Lloyd Garrison, the famous anti-slavery agitator, to hail her as “the first woman in the republic.”