A Strong-minded Woman

by Venet, Wendy Hamand

• ISBN13: 9781558495135
• ISBN10: 1558495134
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-11-30
• Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Pr

Summary

When Mary Livermore died in 1905 at age 84, a Boston newspaper praised her as "America's foremost woman." A leading figure in the struggle for woman's rights as well as in the temperance movement, she was widely recognized during her lifetime as Susan B. Anthony, and for a time the most popular and highly paid female orator in the country. Yet aside from Civil War historians familiar with her service as a wartime nurse, few today remember even her name. In this book, Wendy Hamand Venet reconstructs Mary Livermore's remarkable story and explores how and why she became so renowned in her day. Born and raised in Boston, Livermore left home at age eighteen to become the private schoolteacher to a wealthy tobacco planter's children in Virginia, an experience that afforded her an intimate look at slave-based society in the 1840s. Returning to New England, she married and lived a conventional life as the wife of a minister and mother of three daughters. With the coming of the Civil War, however, Livermore's life changed dramatically when she became active with the United States Sanitary Commission, an organization that would propel her into the public limelight and cause her to challenge society's traditional view of the role of women. After the war Livermore became deeply involved in the woman's rights movement, serving as editor of the newspaper Woman's Journal and later as president of three major suffrage organizations--the American, New England, and Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Associations. She was also founder and president of the Massachusetts Women's Christian Temperance Union, and became active in the Society of Christian Socialists in Boston. Her frequent speaking appearance onbehalf of these causes eventually earned her the nickname "Queen of the Platform." Although she may not have been as radical as some other early feminists, Livermore's ideas resonated with thousands of middle-class women whose experiences paralleled her own. For that reason alone, Venet shows, her life and legacy are worthy of our attention.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
PROLOGUE Mary Livermore and Historical Memory	1	(8)
CHAPTER 1 Boston Childhood	9	(15)
CHAPTER 2 Virginia Teacher	24	(19)
CHAPTER 3 Minister's Wife	43	(20)
CHAPTER 4 Emergence of a Public Woman	63	(23)
CHAPTER 5 God's Missionary Work	86	(21)
CHAPTER 6 Fair Mania	107	(20)
CHAPTER 7 Emergence of a Suffragist	127	(21)
CHAPTER 8 The Agitator	148	(24)
CHAPTER 9 Two Newspapers and a Scandal	172	(23)
CHAPTER 10 Queen of the Platform	195	(26)
CHAPTER 11 Politics, Suffrage, and Socialism	221	(20)
CHAPTER 12 The Grand Old Woman	241	(16)
Notes	257	(50)
Index	307