SOURCE: "Marriage, Career, and Feminine Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America: Reconstructing the Marital Experience of Lydia Maria Child, 1828-1874," in Feminist Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2/3, 1975, pp. 113-30.

In the essay below, Jeffrey examines the consonance between Child's nontraditional married and professional life and her relatively conservative opinion about women's social roles.

Historians who have examined the careers of women who became writers and social reformers in the period from the 1830s to the Civil War have suggested that many of them were covertly protesting against their subordination and expressing hostility to men and the Victorian home.¹ They argue that the confinement of women to a set of domestic roles lay at the heart of subjection of women in nineteenth-century America; but they have produced few detailed studies of individual marriages from the point of view of an articulate woman. Such studies might contribute to an understanding of the ways in...