Letters of Lydia Maria Child (1882)
AUTHOR: Child, Lydia Maria
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a2001.05.0190
https://archive.org/details/letterslydiamar00philgoog/page/n14/mode/2up
---. Lulu's Library
---. Under the Lilacs
---. “The Whale's Story”
---. “What the Imps Did”
Alcott, William. Gift Book for Young Ladies
---. “Man His Brother's Keeper”
---. “Shooting Birds”
Anderson, Martha Jane. Mount Lebanon Cedar Boughs
Bergh, Henry. “An Address”
---. “An Anthropozoonet”
---. “New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals”
Child, Lydia Maria. “Intelligence of Animals”
---. “Kindness to Animals”
---. Letters from New York
---. Letters from New-York: Second Series
---. The Mother's Book
---. “Willie Wild Thing”
Clubb, Henry Stephen. “God's Covenant with Beasts”
---. History of the Philadelphia Bible-Christian Church for the First Century of Its Existence
Douglass, Frederick. “Address Delivered by Hon. Frederick Douglass”
---. “Lecture on Trip to Europe”
---. “Oration by Hon. Frederick Douglass”
Freshel, M. R. L. The Golden Rule Cook Book
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Automobile as a Reformer”
---. “The Beast Prison”
---. “On Dogs”
---. “Pets and Children”
---. “Prisons for Animals”
Howells, William Dean. “Qualities without Defects”
---. “Turkeys Turning the Tables”
---. Tuscan Cities
Lovell, Mary Frances. “Address on Humane Education”
---. “The Fundamental Need of Humane Education”
---. “A Plea for Mercy”
---. “Woman's Responsibility Toward the Animal Creation”
Moore, J. Howard. “Discovering Darwin”
---. “Does Man Overestimate Himself?”
---. Ethics and Education
---. “Evolution and Humanitarianism”
---. High School Ethics
---. “How Vegetarians Observe the Golden Rule”
---. The Law of Biogenesis
---. “The Martyrs of Civilization”
---. “The Unconscious Holocaust”
---. The Universal Kinship
Neff, Flora Trueblood Bennett. Along Life's Pathways
Parker, Theodore. “Of Conscious Religion as a Source of Joy”
Pillsbury, Parker. “A Sun-Burst Letter”
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Palmetto-Leaves
---. “Rights of Dumb Animals”
---. Stories About Our Dogs
Thoreau, Henry David. Cape Cod
---. The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau
---. Excursions
---. Faith in a Seed
---. Journals
---. The Maine Woods
---. Miscellanies
---. Walden
---. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
---. A Yankee in Canada
Trine, Ralph Waldo. Every Living Creature
Twain, Mark. Mark Twain's Book of Animals
Woolman, John. The Journal and Essays of John Woolman
SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)
In some of her letters, Child emphasizes animal sentience and cognition, and voices her support for animal welfare. She does not question human superiority, however, but argues for compassion and benevolence based on this superiority. For example, in an 1864 letter to Eliza Scudder, she expresses her wish that “there were not such a wall of partition between us and the animal world,” because it “would be so curious and entertaining to understand what they are about, and to help them in emergencies by our superior strength and wisdom” (182). Human superiority is thus not only a fact for Child, but it would even hold if there was no barrier between the human and animal worlds. Child's interest in animals primarily derives from a thirst for knowledge, and her arguments for treating animals with kindness and respect are welfarist (as also expressed in, for example, “Intelligence of Animals”). In the rest of the letter Child recounts how she failed to raise a swallow after its nest had fallen down the chimney and its mother had abandoned it.
In a letter to S. B. Shaw in 1873, Child affirms that she has “taken a lively interest” in the “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” and has “been a member of the Boston society from the beginning” (213). She is convinced that “man does not yet sufficiently recognize his kindred with animals” (213-214). “If they were tenderly and rationally treated from their birth,” she continues, “I believe it would make a vast change in the development of their faculties and feelings” (214). The human should be “a companion and a friend”: on this point, see again her “Intelligence of Animals”; Child even uses the same example of “Arabian horses” and their masters (214).