March is Women’s History Month, and Dr Lydia Moland of Colby College has recently published a new biography of the abolitionist author Lydia Maria Child, who spent 2 years in Northampton. 

From the Chicago University Press website: 

By 1830, Lydia Maria Child [1802 – 1880] had established herself as something almost unheard of in the American nineteenth century: a beloved and self-sufficient female author. Best known today for the immortal poem “Over the River and through the Wood,” Child had become famous at an early age for spunky self-help books and charming children’s stories. But in 1833, Child shocked her readers by publishing the first book-length argument against slavery in the United States—a book so radical in its commitment to abolition that friends abandoned her, patrons ostracized her, and her book sales plummeted. Yet Child soon drew untold numbers to the abolitionist cause, becoming one of the foremost authors and activists of her generation.