As a translator, editor, educator, and author, Mary Tyler Peabody Mann advocated education reforms and the abolition of slavery, defended the rights of Native Americans, and called for temperance in food, drink, and attire. Throughout her life she embraced the spiritual mission of the nineteenth-century, middle-class American woman, assuming leadership roles that extended the domestic sphere and facilitated the humanitarian work of more vocal public leaders such as her sister Elizabeth Palmer Peabody; her husband, Horace Mann; President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento of Argentina; and Paiute Indian Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. Mary Mann published most of her works during the last twenty-five years of her life, after her husband had died and her sons had become young men. These public writing projects, like her earlier private observations in letters and journals, reveal her lifelong commitment to educational, political, and social reforms that supported self-respect and respect for others.

Mann's interest...