19th century American reformers
19th century social reform
A01=Wendy Hamand Venet
activism and social change
activist women in America
American women orators
Author_Wendy Hamand Venet
biography of prominent reformers
Boston social history
Boston women reformers
Category=DNBH
Category=JBSF11
Category=JH
Christian socialist movement
Civil War women volunteers
early feminist figures
early feminist leadership
early women editors
early women reform leaders
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
female civic leaders
female Civil War nurses
female public speakers
female reform movements
feminist public speaking
historical accounts of women's movements
historical biographies of reformers
history of American women's movements
leadership of women reformers
Mary Livermore biography
Massachusetts suffrage history
Massachusetts Women's Christian Temperance Union
middle-class female activism
middle-class women's reform
New England women's activism
nineteenth-century temperance activism
nineteenth-century women leaders
public advocacy for women
social activism in Boston
social reform history
temperance movement leaders
United States Sanitary Commission
Woman's Journal editor
women in civic organizations
women in nineteenth-century America
women in the abolitionist era
women's advocacy and reform
women's charitable and civic work
women's historical contributions
women's public influence
women's reform networks
women's rights activists
women's rights in post-Civil War America
women's social justice history
women's social leadership
women's social reform campaigns
women's suffrage organizations
Product details
- ISBN 9781558495135
- Weight: 550g
- Dimensions: 164 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 26 Oct 2005
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This is the first biography of an important nineteenth-century reformer. 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 as 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 appearances on behalf 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.
WENDY HAMAND VENET is associate professor of history at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She is the author of Nelther Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War and the coeditor of Midwestern Women: Work, Community, and Leadership at the Crossroads.
