Rebuilding Babylon: The Pluralism of Lydia Maria Child

SCOTT L. PRATT

One of the most influential brunches of nineteenth-century American feminism wus a resistance movement committed to the idea that the key to social reform was the recognition and maintenance of humun differences. This approach, which became central to American pragmatism, had its roots in a tradition of American women writers including Lydia Muria Child. This paper examines Child’s work and focuses on her conception of pluralism and its role in sustaining diverse communities.

In his well-known work, The Public and Its Problems (1984), John L3ewey provides a prescription for the ills of American democracy. Writing in 1926, during a time of unparalleled wealth and unparalleled poverty, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and labor struggle, Dewey insisted that “the cure for the ailments of democracy is more dernocracy” (1926, 327,325). Here, clemocracy is a way of life, a pervasive attitudc and range of practices that form and promote the growth of human communities. It is the means h y which individuals and communities find their voices, identify the ends that provide purpose, and take collective action. Yet, even a s the slogan inarks the central tenet of Dewey’s conception of democracy, it also recalls a rich but little studied philosophical tradition that played a sig- nificant role in framing the context for Dewey’s work: American feminism.

Ikwey’s slogan, ;is it turns ou t , appears in print twenty-four years earlier in Jane Addams’s book Democracy and Social Ethics (2002), originally published in 1902. The book, which Dewey probably read not long after its publication, stands within a. philosophical tradition in America that emerged in the early nineteenth century. This tradition, distinct in many ways from the liberal feminist tradition founded in England by Mary Wollstonecraft (for exalmple, 1988) and in America by Frances Wright (for example, 1830), attacked thc

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status of women in American society, but did so while committed to the value of human difference and the need ;it times for a community to make shared judgments and take collective action framed by a common ground. “We are thus brought,” Addams says, “to a conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all men nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule o f living as well as a test of faith.” The consequence of such a view is that people do not travel “a sequestered byway,” but rather “by mixing on the thronged and common road where all must turn ou t for one another, and at least see the size of one another’s burden” (2002, 7). Experienced differences of gender, culture, and r x e are not, for Addams, something to be excluded from or ignored in the processes of governance but rather are the key to making them work. “We realize too,” she continues, “that social perspectives and sanity of judgment come only from contact with social experience” (2002, 7). The result of such an approach to judgment is not a set of fixed universal rights, but an ongoing process of interaction, of fostering differences and means of communication iicross difference. Initiating her own study and summarizing the tradition from which her work emerged, Addams concludes: “No attempt is made to reach a conclusion, not to offer advice beyond the assumption that the cure for the ills of L)emocracy is more Democracy” (2002, 9).

Addams’s conception of democracy and its attendant conceptions of know- ing, being, and human difference are not solely the product of her genius, how- ever. Instead, they can be understood as continuous with a long line of feminist thinkers that includes Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1898), Anna Julia Cooper (1998), Louisa May Alcott (1873), Margaret Fuller (1997), Lydia Sigourney (1866), Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1991), and Lydia Maria Child (1831). For these women, recognizing and sustaining human differences in the context of a flourishing community was the key to social reform. In such a community, women were not only to be recognized as full members but also as bringing a distinctive perspective to the shared interests and efforts of the wider group. For some, including Child, Alcott, and Cooper, differences of race and culture inarked distinctive contributions as well and so also had value. For them, a healthy society was one in which human beings were recognized for their diverse origins, interests, and knowledge. Such an approach could not be sustained by a single process of judgment but only by adopting ways of thinking compat- ible with both the flourishing of valuable differences and the need at times for shared judgment and action.

A recovery of this American feminist tradition is important for at least two reasons. First, as a matter of understanding the context out of which Ameri- can pragmatism emerged, understanding its relation to feminism can help one to see how the tradition developed and what resources outside the European philosophical tradition played a role in its development. Second, and perhaps

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more important, recovering this American feminist tradition can help to over- come some of the difficulties of applying classical pragmatism to the problems of the twenty-first century. Even as philosophers such as Dewey struggled to develop ways of thinking and living that could address economic oppression, they nevertheless overlooked the implications of their own views for respond- ing to oppression grounded in differences of race and gender. The American feminist movement brought not only an awareness of the status of women, but also challenged the removal of Native American peoples from traditional lands, the oppression of immigrant peoples, the abuse of children, and the neglect of elders. The feminist approach was like the classical pragmatist approach in that it called for giving up the quest for certainty and absolute principles in favor of an attitude that sought answers within lived situations. It went beyond classical pragmatism by systematically recognizing the reality and value of differences of gender, culture, and race, and by enriching the attitude of inquiry in a way that makes it responsive to the problem of a new century. In this brief discus- sion, I will focus on the beginnings of this American feminism in the work of Lydia Maria Child.

Child is an iinportant figure for a number of reasons.’ Her active writing and publishing career spanned nearly 55 years, beginning in 1824. Her work directly and indirectly addressed mcist of the crucial issues of the nineteenth century: the genocide of indigenous Americans, slavery, anti-Black racism, the oppression of women, women’s suffrage, the treatment of the poor, child labor, and the condition of cities. She was one of the best known and most widely read authors of the period. She published the first and most popular children’s magazine in nineteenth century America, juvenile Miscellany (1826-1834); edited one of the two major abolition newspapers, The National Anti-Slavery Standard (1841-1843); wrote two immensely popular household guides, The Frugal Housewife (1972) and The Mother’s Book (1831); edited and published a widely read slave autobiography, Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl (Jacobs 1987); and self-published and distributed textbooks (1865) to the Freedman’s schools opened in the South after the Civil War. These widely circulated publications served as vehicles for presenting a philosophical perspective developed in her other work, including two volumes of essays, Letters from New York (1998, 1845); an analysis of European American relations with Native Americans, The First Settlers of New England (1829); an analysis of slavery and anti-Black racism, An Appeal on Behalf of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1996) as well as a history of women (1835); and a three-volume history of religious ideas (1855).

Child’s work is distinctive in part because it appears to grow out of her own experience of cultural diversity and her early commitment to the value of such diversity in fostering human communities (see Karchar 1994). Born Lydia Francis in 1802 in Medforcl, Massachusetts, Child was sent to live with her sister in Norridgewock, Maine, where she lived for most of her teenage years.

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Norridgewock was a border town, a small community of European-descended people surrounded by Penobscot and Abenaki villages. With little more than a year of formal education, Lydia was schooled largely by her older brother, who woiild eventually graduate from Harvard. When not at her lessons, she apparently spent much time visiting nearby Native villages, where she came to know several Penohscot people well, including the “governor” of the Penobscot, known as Captain Neptune, and his nephew, Etalexis. Child’s earliest work, a novel entitled Hobomok (1824, is a tale of a young English settler named Mary Conant who loves an English dissenter driven from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and a Native man who had proven to be a friend of the colony. The story challenges expectations about both European-American relations with Native people and about the status of women in European-American society. In fact, most of Child’s earliest stories were based on themes of cross cultural communication, its occasional success, and its frequent disastrous failure. Her work during this period differs from much of the literature of the time because it presents a vision of cultural coexistence rather than cultural genocide, and because in presenting this vision she adopts a narrative style that seems more grounded in Native approaches to narrative than in the literature of the day (see Pratt 2002, chaps. 10 and 11).

Child was among the first European-American writers to present so-called dotnestic fiction without framing her narratives as morality tales bound to tran- scendent moral principles. Instead, her narratives are organized within concrete situations where conflicts and resolutions are bound to the circumstances o f the situation itself. While James Fenimore Cooper became the model for some of the literature of the mid and late nineteenth century (see, for example, 1981 and 198.3), Child’s work became a starting point for another range of literature that challenged Cooper’s presumptions and narrative strategies. This alter- nate tradition of writers included Sedgwick, Fuller, and Alcott, and in some ways Harriet Beecher Stowe (1994) and Herman Melville (1967). Each took advantage of the liberatory potential of Child’s narrative approach to challenge expectations about the status and role of women and people of color in the developing society of North America.

In response tu the Winnebago War of 1827 in what is now Wisconsin, and the Indian removal crisis developing in Georgia in the wake of Andrew Jackson’s election to the presidency of the United States in 1828, Child self-published The First Settlers of New England in 1829. While the highly controversial work was not circulated widely, she used the work, framed as a dialogue between a mother and her two daughters, to develop both a conception of the value of cultural difference and to make explicit connections between the oppression of women and racism. The framework developed here became even inore developed in her 1833 Appeal on Behalf of That Class of Americans called African. In both works, the oppression of non-white peoples a d women was viewed as the consequence

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of a way of thinking that saw difference (of gender and race) as inferiority. L i l t on Native peoples were not t o be understood simply a s

failures to recognize human sameness, but rather as failures to respect human difference. Her response to these failures was not to call for the elimination or isolation of differences (the dominant pattern of response). Instead, she tried to construct ii way of thinking that at once sustained differences and left open the possibility for interaction. Such interaction did not amount to assimilation, but rather to a kind of ongoing pluralism. Recalling perhaps her own early experi- ence with Captain Neptune and his people, Child’s argument in An Appeal ends by focusing on the need to end miscegenation laws. A living pluralism, she suggests, will be a n embodied pluralism, written in different morphologies and different ways of life held together by those who live on an intimate border between peoples as friends, lovers, parents, and children (see Child 1996, esp. chaps. I, V, and VII1).

The publication of An Appeal destroyed Child’s finances, forced the end of her involvement with Juvenile Miscellany, and drastically reduced the sales of her household manuals. A few years earlier, in 1828, Lydia Francis had mar- ried David Child, an abolitionist and editor of the Massachusetts Journal (see Karchar 1994, xix-xxv). In 1829, llavid WAS convicted of libel and jailed for six months in 1830. Lydia, now called Maria Child, inherited her husband’s debt and his fine and became his sole financial support. Despite their circumstances, however, she and llavid decided to puhlish An Appeal and suffer the conse- quences. Excluded from the Boston literary community that had welcomed her with the publication of Mobomok, she continued to write and by the end of the 181Os, working with abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, had become an important voice in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and an increasingly well-known essayist in the cause of abolition. As an activist in Boston, she became a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and a frequent partici- pant in conversations with him and the other founders of Transcendentalism, including Margaret Fuller with whom Child read a series of works by women authors in Europe. When the New England Anti-Slavery Society voted to bar women from participating, Child moved to New York City where she became the editor of the new National Anti-Slavery Standard. As an editor and regular contributor, Child was able to develop her philosophical perspective at some length in a series of “letters” first published in the Standard and later reworked and published as Letters from New York (1998).

As if drawing together her own experience along the borders between Native and European America, between women and men, and between Blacks and Whites, Child begins her first letter with the statement of a problem. She sup- poses that a friend, her reader, has just asked her about her experience of New York City as a new resident. She refraines the question: “You ask what is now my opinion of the Great Babylon” (1998,9). The choice of Babylon as the figure for

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New York is significant. Babylon, we are to recall, is at once a synonym for evil in the Biblical language of the day and at the same time names a marvelous city renowned both for its efforts to connect earth to heaven and for the magnificent failure that became an origin of human difference. In this way Babylon is a place of contradiction, of innovation and collapse, of possibility and horror. “Well, Babylon remains the same. . . . The din of crowded life, and the eager chase for gain, still runs through its streets, like the perpetual murmur of a hive. Wealth dozes on French couches, thrice piled, and canopied with damask, while Poverty camps on the dirty pavement, or sleeps off its wretchedness in the watchhouse. There, amid the splendour of Broadway, sits the blind negro beggar, with horny hand anJ tattered garments, while opposite to him stands the stately mansion of the slave trader, still plying his bloody trade, and laughing to scorn the cobweb laws, through which the strong can break so easily” (1998, 9).

Yet the contradictions give way over time to recognition that meaning is not made from some transcendent perspective but as the product of particulars, of taking root and living in a particular place. From this perspective, New York is not the demonic city destined for destruction in Jeremiah’s prophecy; it is instead ;I fertile ground for the flourishing of human life. Child identifies the city’s potential and calls for its rebuilding through an alternative vision, a dif- ferent logic, that finds value in the chaos. Child proposes and illustrates this alternative logic through letters that reclaim the past and its legacy of differ- ence as R means of transforming Babylon into a place of growth, diverse in its constituents while literally standing on a common ground. She concludes the last letter of the first volume by asserting the challenge and the vision: ‘‘DO you fear that the patriot will be lost in the cosmopolite? Never fear. We shall not love our own household less, because we love others more” (1998, 178). The Letters themselves serve a s a map of how to rebuild Babylon.

The central claim in her conclusion that the patriot and the cosmopolitan can flourish together depends finally on a conception of human self and human difference that can dispose the two apparently antithetical characters to a peace- ful coexistence. The apparent split between the two marks what Child takes to be the general character of one’s experience of the world. “Minds accustomed to observe the relation between the inward and outward are struck,” she says, “with the duality that prevails everywhere” (1845, 114). Such duality, however, marks a continuity that deinands the persistence of both connection and difference, rather than a split. Anticipating Charles Sanders Peirce’s idea of continuity (see Peirce 1992), Child concludes, “I have spoken of the constant reciirrence of duality; but it is equally true, though not equally obvious in all particulars that where there are two, there occiirs a third, the ultimate plane of both” (1845, 123). Conflict erupts when dualities are taken as unconnected opposites struggling to overwhelm each other. The conflict erupts in Babylon when its residents ignore the continuity between inward and outward, between

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thought and action, between one place and another, between one people and another. To set aside the “third,” a s she puts it, is to open up the possibility of deception and destruction. It is this sort of split, she argues, that makes slavery possible (fbr example, Child 1996, 11, 15). At once, white citizens (that is, white men), affirm belief in justice, freedom, and Christianity and yet continue to hold or permit the holding of slaves. By splitting belief from action, whites are able to sustain the evils of slavery. By recognizing the connections hetween their beliefs and their actions as well a s the connections between themselves and African Americans, they gain at once the means to take action against slavery. Similarly, those who make sharp distinctions between men and women can, in light of other interests such as greed and power, use the separation to bar women from owning property, voting, having access to education, and even caring for their own children. For poor women and women of color, this separa- tion justifies destitution, rape, and death. For middle class women it manifests as “gallantry; an odious word to every sensible woman, because she sees that it is merely a flimsy veil which fcoppery throws over sensuality, to conceal its gross- ness” (1998, 153). Rather than k i n g an attitude of “esteem and affection’’ as it purports to be, it is a systematic effort to disenfranchise women and maintain their subservient status: “This taking away of rights, and condescending to grant privileges is an old trick of the physical force principle; and with the immense majority, who only look on the surface of things, this mask effectually disguises ugliness, which otherwise would be abhorred” (1998, 153). The result of failing to recognize the continuity between men and women grounds the oppression of women, and as Child suggests, it is the willingness to separate the inward from the outward that helps to sustain the lie.

The recognition of the “third,” what Child calls the “Law of Love,” provides the grounds for action that will address the oppression of women and the vio- lence of slavery and genocide. “The cure of all the ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrows, and the crimes of humanity,” she concludes, “all lie in that one word, LOVE. It is the divine vitality that everywhere produces and restores life” (1998, 123). Love necessarily rejects hierarchical relations of power and instead adopts an attitude of connection consistent with the injunction to “love as brothers.” “Here is the great deficiency in all our efforts for the ignorant and the criminal,” she continues, “We stand apart from them, and expect them to feel grateful for our condescension in noticing them at all. We do not embrace them warmly with our sympathies, and put o u r souls into their soul’s stead” (1998, 163). Love, in short, is the third, “the ultimate plane,” that provides continuity in human relations. That it is also a pervasive aspect of human experience has the double effect o f making love something accessible to everyone. It is “universal,” she claims, where ‘universal’ is taken as “open to all who wish to receive” (1998, 72), and so availahle to all B S a resource. As a result, love can provide the starting point for interaction across differences, and, at the same time it can be cultivated

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as a means for deciding what one ought to do in such interactions. By placing one’s soul in another’s “stead,” one gives up the idea that any one perspective can serve as the sole standard in terms of which judgments can be made and actions taken. If, for example, men wish to know what to do in interaction with women, or whites wish to know what to do in interactions with Native people, they must see what the “other soul” directs.

Child justifies the law of love, or what amounts tu a principle of continuity, not as an article of faith but as a conclusion drawn from close examination of experience. O n one hand, continuity appears within human experience when one considers the complexity of one’s interactions with others and their places. Each of Child’s letters serves to illustrate how one can examine experience to recognize the continuities, and in this sense each letter forms a kind of proof for the larger claim. O n the other hand, human experience can be understood by analogy in terms of the processes of organic growth. Child illustrates the connection and the analogical frame for continuity in her references to plants and her frequent discussion of the cultivation of gardens. She draws the con- nection early by observing that her Babylon is being rebuilt in part because she has herself “taken root.” She says that her first experience of the city’s chaos and contradiction had been transformed. “1 like [the city] better,” she says and then continues: “This is partly because I am like the Lady’s Delight, ever prone to take root, and look up with a smile in whatever soil you place it” (1998, 10). The procedure of recognizing continuity, Child is convinced, is not simply a principle applied from on high but an emergent feature of human experience. It is, in effect, natural to be committed to the law of love and natural that, like it or not, it often shows itself. In simply attending to the play of duality in experience one can see that some third is demanded. From this perspective, the principle of continuity is found not by “gazing” at the surface, settling on external things, but rather by engaging in a way that “looks inward” and finds what is necessary to “produce and sustain life.’12

In the first letter, as she frames her discussion in terms of Babylon, Child proposes as her approach one that does not stop on the surface of the things and events she experiences. The process, she suggests, is one of coming to live in a place. After months in her new city, she concludes, “I have lost the power of looking merely on the surface.” Instead, everything seems connected, bound by some unclear principle: “Every thing seems to me to come from the Infinite, to be filled with the Infinite, to he tending toward the Infinite” (1998,lO). From this perspective, she begins to understand things in their relations so that they are always part of a network of things, located in a context with no fixed bound- aries. In short, nothing is excluded a priori, nor is everything included at once. ‘‘I always see much within a landscape-‘a light and a revealing’ everywhere’’ (1998, 16). To know something, to find moral and other guidance, one must look inside, not into some featureless soul, but into a situation, a landscape,

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in t e r m of which one can act. The o n l y thing that seems prohibited from this perspective is an unwillingness to “look inward.”

If the principle of continuity provides the ontology of experience and the law of love its organization, one might argue that Child is not really rebuilding Babylon as much a s she is ailvocating for an American melting pot in which differences are finally subsumed by some “inward” gaze. Summarizing her attack on those who advocate for the supremacy of one religious sect or another Child seems to affirm the objection. “The world,” she says, “regenerated and made free, will at last bid a glad farewell to clans and sects! Would that their graves were dug and their requiems sung; and nothing but their standards and costumes left, a s curious historical records of the Benighted Past” (1998, 24). Writing in a period marked by the rise of Jacksonian democracy and the idea of Manifest Destiny, it might be that Child is only justifying imperialism by another means. And yet in reply, it is important to recall that the “third” Child discusses does not replace the dualities it bridges but rather depends upon them for its own being. The “third” does not subsume difference, but affirms its continuity. Child presents this relation in her ideas of truth and growth that stand in cooperative tension with continuity and love.

Truth, for Child, is determined not by some relation with fixed transcendent principles or a fixed relationship with some given set of immanent truths, but rather, truth is a disposition to recognize one’s own place in relation to others in a changing world. I n this sense, truth is a way of characterizing what one finds “within a landscape.” It is recognition of what and who one is, as a matter of culture, class, and gender without masking one’s goods and evils or disconnect- ing them from the circumstances that give rise to them. To speak the truth is to talk about the inaterial conditions of life, the power relations in which people live, the pains and joys they face, and the need for social change. Put another way, truth is recognizing the reality o f differences in human experience not in order to reduce them away but to engage them as part of lived experience for better and worse. This is not to say that differences, especially those that lead to oppression and violence, ought to be accepted a s “part of the landscape.” Not all landscapes ;ire equal and no landscape is unchanging. When taken with the law of love, truths, relations within landscapes, are continuous with each other and open to the possibilities of trailsforination. As Child puts it, “Truth is harsh, only when divorced from Love” (1998, 58). What love adds to truth is the idea that things can change through developing relations, that those isolated from opportunity can come to be connected with new possibilities.

At the same time, it is not clear what will govern the transformation of landscapes. It may be clear that it is best to be true to one’s place and even to recognize that one’s place is continuous with others, but what provides the criti- cal values that can ensure that some are not left to live in poverty and others to live in wealth and privilege!

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In the end, metaphors of growth mark the values that come to govern pos- sibilities. When Child describes herself as a flower, “a Lady’s Delight,” she recalls the importance of lived experience in her analysis and points toward the idea that the truth of human beings is that they are, like plants, organisms who figuratively and literally take root in particular places. The truth of such organ- isms is not that they merely occupy a place or that they function indifferently, but rather that a s organisms, they start out with a sense of direction governed partly by their circumstances and partly by an interest in continuing to live and even thrive. In the literature o f the time, William Ellery Channing called this idea “cultLire.” In an address delivered in Boston in 1838, Channing described the idea this way: “To cultivate any thing, be it a plant, an animal, a mind, is to make it grow. Growth, expansion, is the end. Nothing admits culture but that which has a principle of life, capable of being expanded” (Channing 1877, 15). Child develops this idea of culture or growth most clearly in her discussion of the status of women.

Writing in response to those who asked her to take a stand on the women’s movement then beginning under the leadership of Frances Wright, Child concludes: “I am not one of those who maintain that there is no sex in souls; nor do I like the results deducible from that doctrine.” For Child, women are not correctly understood a s inen made different by accidental circumstances; women, rather, are distinctive in ways that cannot be eliminated without damage to the “truth.” By being different, however, women make a distinctive contribution to others and at the same time have different needs and interests bound up with their particular place. These truths about the differences between men and women become manifest in part as a normative principle about what constitutes a good. Yet while the goods for women and men may be different in some ways, they nevertheless share a cmimon normative framework: “True culture, in [women], as in men, consists in the full and free development of individual character, regulated by their own perceptions of what is true, and their own love of what is good” (1998, 153-54).

True culture seems to suggest that women and men, as organisms born or planted in particular places, will flourish to the degree that their distinctiveness as sexual and gendered organisms is fostered. Such distinctiveness, governed hy continuity does not stand as ultimately separate, of course, but is bound up with the goods of others. Hatred or discontinuity, from this perspective, is a process in which love is rejected and prejudice and intolerance adopted. T h e exclusion of women from opportunities in society amounts to hatred just as slavery and the removal of Native peoples is a form of hatred: “The conviction that woman’s present position in society is a false one, and therefore, reacts disastrously on the happiness and improvement of man, is pressing, by slow degrees, on the common consciousness, through all the obstacles of bigotry, sensuality, and selfishness. As man approaches to the truest life, he will perceive

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more and more that there is not separation o r discord in their mutual duties. They will be one, but it will be as affection and thought are one, the treble and bass of the same harmonious tune” (1998, 156). Love cures the ills of American society by promoting the coexistence and interaction of differences. Writing about the potential for the Coexistence of Native and European Americans Child concludes: “That the races of mankind are different, spiritually as well ;is physically, there is, of course, no doubt; but it is a s the difference between trees of the same forest, not as between trees and minerals.” When the groups are viewed in light of t ru th and continuity, however, “you will find the result variety, without inferiority. They will be flutes on different notes, and so har- monize better” (3998, 162-63).

In the end, the key to rebuilding Babylon is to establish a society where ideas of hierarchy are replaced with ideas of coexistence, where differences are valued and interaction promoted. Such B society will maintain its diversity, and a t the s;iine time have those who will bridge differences in body and in discourse and provide the ground for cultural development in response to new circumstances and possibilities. Recognizing that the past is a resource that does not fully determine the future, Child’s Babylon will accept its limitations: it cannot reach heaven by means of a single massive edifice. It will also accept the diversity of language and culture that emerged a s its limitations were learned. Having lost the direct route to certainty that the Tower of Babel was to supply, Child wants Babylon to take advantage of its changed circumstances to find new ways to foster “true culture.” Of this vision she concludes, using the words o f Swedish author Fredericka Bremer: “The human heart is like Heaven; the more angels, the more room” (quoted in Child 1998, 178). In American democracy a parallel principle is called for by Child’s successors in the tradition. As Addams puts it, “diversified human experience and resultant sympathy . . . are the foundation and guarantee of democracy” (2002, 7).

This piper was originally prestmted at the l k e i n h e r 2000 meeting of the Society o f Philosophers in America held in conjunction with the Eastern 1)ivisioii meeting of the American P1iiIosophic;il Association.

I . There are several excellent discussions of Child in recent literature. C;irolyn Karchar’s cultural hiojiraphy of Child, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural fhgraphy of Lydia Muriu ( M d ( l w ) , provides a comprehensive review of Child’s life and work. Other valu;ihle works on Child include Mills (1994) and Pratt (2002).

2. Child also writes, “if t i e Law of Love prevailecl, vase5 of gold and silver might even inore ahound-hut no homeless outcast would sit shivering heneath their glittering mockery’’ (1998, 61).

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