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.
Pillars are fallen at thy feet, Fanes quiver in the air,A prostrate city is thy seat, And thou alone art there.
Genius hath electric power Which earth can never tame,Bright suns may scorch and dark clouds lower, Its flash is still the same.
England may as well dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes as to fetter the step of Freedom, more proud and firm in this youthful land than where she treads the sequestered glens of Scotland, or couches herself among the magnificent mountains of Switzerland.
We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.
They [the slaves] have stabbed themselves for freedom—jumped into the waves for freedom—starved for freedom—fought like very tigers for freedom! But they have been hung, and burned, and shot—and their tyrants have been their historians!