Lydia Maria Francis Child Biography

Lydia Maria Child (February 11, 1802 – October 20, 1880) was an American abolitionist, women's rights activist, opponent of American expansionism, Indian rights activist, novelist, and journalist and Unitarian.

Her journals, fiction and domestic manuals reached wide audiences from the 1820s through the 1850s. She at times shocked her audience, as she tried to take on issues of both male dominance and white supremacy in some of her stories.

Despite these challenges, Child was later most remembered for her poem, Over the River and Through the Woods about Thanksgiving. (Her grandfather's house, restored by Tufts University in 1976, still stands near the Mystic River on South Street .