February 11

1802: (Birthday) Lydia Maria Child, author and renowned abolitionist born in Medford, Massachusetts. She wrote An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. She was publisher-editor of the Juvenile Miscellany, a periodical for children. When she suggested education and the repeal of laws which discriminated against blacks it caused such an uproar in Boston that she was shunned from society.

LMC was named to the executive committee of the American Anti- Slavery Society by William Lloyd Garrison and edited the National Anti-slavery Standard but was removed by Garrison because she was seen as too womanly and moderate in her views. Her Letters from New York 1843-45 was a best seller going through 11 editions from 1845 to 1879. One pamphlet Child wrote condemning slavery sold 300,000 copies in the north.

Today, she is probably best known for her reply to a southern woman who insisted that Southerners were kind and helpful to slave women at childbirth. Child replied, “In New England, too, ‘the pangs of maternity’… meet with the requisite assistance, and here at the North, after we have helped the mothers, we do not sell the babies.”

1836: (A First) Mount Holyoke Seminary, the first woman’s college in the U.S., chartered in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

1916: Emma Goldman arrested under the Comstock Law of 1873 while giving a public lecture on family planning and birth control.

1970: (Law) The state of Hawaii enacts a law approving abortions for women who had been residents of the state for 90 days.

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