Lydia Maria Child: A Radical Model for Sustainable Activism

Lydia Maria Child was one of the nineteenth century’s most radical reformers. Born in 1802, she renounced early fame as a novelist in order to devote her life to ending slavery and the racism that sustained it. Her fifty years of public activism included calls to her fellow citizens to resist the unchecked consumerism that allowed racial injustice to thrive. Across dozens of publications, she urged Americans to recognize self-sufficiency and respect for the natural world as crucial for democracy. Join Lydia Moland, author of Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life to learn how Child sustained decades of democratic activism in the face of ostracism, violence, apathy, and war, and to think together about how to use her example to sustain our own activism in our struggles for justice today.