SOURCE: "Women's History and Feminist Thought: Romantic Discoveries and Transformations," in Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America, 1830-1860, Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 93-133.

In the following excerpt, Conrad argues that Child's writings on women 's history did not champion prototypical feminist causes but did create "a usable past" in which readers could discover "the great varieties of female experience."

In contrast to the almost linear progression of American feminism's social origins, those of women's history were as diverse as the interests, temperaments, and talents of individual women who wrote about it. Like many feminists, Lydia Maria Child, the first American intellectual to record women's history, was deeply committed to abolitionism, her intellectual contributions to that cause rank her with the most important Americans engaged in antislavery work. However, just as [Elizabeth] Stanton came to view feminism and abolitionism as separate concerns, Child kept her work in...