SOURCE: "Lydia Maria Child: Abolitionist Critic of American Foreign Policy," in Women and American Foreign Policy, Greenwood Press, 1987, pp. 1-18.

In the essay that follows, which was originally published in 1987, Crapol examines Child's life and writings—especially her abolitionist An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans—in order to demonstrate her complex and influential views on American foreign policy.

One of the pioneer female critics of American diplomacy was the nineteenth century abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. Born in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1802, she was the youngest of the six children of David Convers Francis, a baker who obtained modest fame and fortune as the producer of the "Medford cracker," and Susannah Rand Francis. Before reaching the age of thirty, Maria Child, as she preferred to be called, had made her mark as an intellectual who was at once a successful novelist, a noted author of...