Lydia Child

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) was an American author, editor, and reformer whose writing linked literature with social activism. She gained early popularity with the novel *Hobomok* (1824) and reached a wide audience through the domestic guide *The Frugal Housewife* (1829). A committed abolitionist, she published *An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans* (1833), a landmark antislavery work, and later edited the National Anti-Slavery Standard in New York. Child also supported women’s rights and wrote extensively across genres, including fiction, journalism, and advice literature, remaining influential in nineteenth-century reform culture.