Opening Words on 2005-11-13:
Lydia Child
By Derrie Frost
University Unitarian Universalist Society, November 13, 2005
Copyright © 2005 by Derrie Frost. All rights reserved.
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Over the river and through the wood/To grandmother’s house we go;/The horse knows the way/To carry the sleigh/Through the white and drifted snow.
It wasn’t Robert Frost…it wasn’t even Edgar Guest who wrote this 19th century sentiment we still associate with Thanksgiving as surely as turkey and dressing. Actually these sweet, childlike words were part of a 12-verse poem written by one of our earliest feminists--Lydia Maria Child of Wayland, Mass. who wrote poetry and a daring novel about a Puritan girl who falls in love with an Indian, and went on to found Juvenile Miscellany, the nation‘s first children‘s magazine. Edgar Allen Poe described her fiction as “an honor to our country and a signal triumph for our countrywoman.”
Celebrity is one thing; influence is another. Her influence was about to become profound. In 1833 she developed a deep friendship with Boston abolitionist Wm. Lloyd Garrison, which led her to write one of the earliest book-length attacks on slavery, calling for total equality for blacks and blaming Northern business interests for propping up the slave trade. At a time when the concept of abolition was repugnant, the book basically killed her financially and professionally. Still she continued to speak out on behalf of just causes, using her own money to publish a reading textbook for freed slaves and calling for a more humane policy toward American Indians. She also attended abolitionist sermons at a local Unitarian Church.
Ironically, Lydia Child’s best writing and the strong purposes of her life are virtually unrecognized, while her little offhand poem has become a classic. The Wayland Historical Society has taken steps to rectify this situation. Recently she was posthumously inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, alongside the likes of Rosalynn Carter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A local Unitarian minister, Ken Sawyer, used Lydia Child’s outspoken support of what’s right as an example of extreme courage after the September 11 attacks of 2001. Every few years he has his congregation sing her Thanksgiving song. “It has a power for me,” he says, “to be reminded that people can respond bravely on behalf of their ideals, increases the prospect that some of us might.”
Lydia Child expressed it more simply: Over the river, and through the wood/And straight through the barnyard gate;/We seem to go extremely slow/It is so hard to wait.