Born in Boston in 1820, Mary Ashton Livermore was an author and poet, a noted journalist, abolitionist, public lecturer, and women’s right’s advocate. Sparked by two years spent as a tutor on a plantation in Virginia, where she witnessed the cruelty of slavery first hand, she took up the fight against slavery. In 1860, she campaigned for Lincoln, one of the first women to give speeches for a political party at the time.
Recognized for her contributions to the Republican cause, she was the only woman given a desk in the Chicago Wigwam, headquarters for the 1860 Republican Convention.
During the Civil War she served as a nurse. Her newspaper articles from the front raised the public’s awareness of the poor treatment given the wounded soldiers. This lead to her becoming a hospital inspector and then an organizer of the Sanitary Commission and Fair in Chicago. Despite having to leave her three children, she crisscrossed the region giving speeches to raise money for the care of the wounded.
After the war, she turned her attentions to women’s rights, founding the Agitator, a women’s suffragist journal. When the women’s movement divided in 1869, she joined the American Women’s Suffrage Association. This was followed by a move back to Boston, where she became editor of the merged the Agitator and the nationally circulated, Women’s Magazine.
She never gave up her fight to improve the lives of women, serving as president of the American Suffrage Association, going on to found the Association for the Advancement of Women. In the late 1800s, she was considered one of America’s greatest women.
In 1897, she discovered someone was writing her biography. A private person and not one to retain her letters and papers, this pushed her to start writing her own autobiography. The following excerpt is taken from the preface to The Story of My Life: or, The Sunshine and Shadow of Seventy Years.
Every human soul has its secret chamber, which no one is allowed to invade. Our uncomforted sorrows, our tenderest and most exquisite loves, our remediless disappointments, our highest aspirations, our constantly baffled efforts for higher attainments, are known only to ourselves and God. We never talk of them. When these are counted out, with numerous events in which one has participated with living people, whose narration might leave a sting, the story of one’s life seems to one’s self to lose color, and to dwindle in its proportions. Who would care to read it? What good purpose would its publication serve? If one outstays the average longevity of the race, the waters of oblivion close over him, and he is forgotten before he dies, while the ranks close up immediately when one drops on the march, and his very name is soon unheard. Why then write an autobiography at all? And I found my courage oozing out at the finger-tips, whenever I addressed myself to the task of telling the story of my life.
Works by Mary Ashton Livermore
- The Two Families; and The Duty that Lies Nearest. Prize Stories (1848)
- Pen Pictures or Sketches from Domestic Life (1863) – includes two poems
- What Shall We Do With Our Daughters?
- (1883)
- My Story of the War. A Woman’s Narrative of Four Years’ Personal Experience as Nurse in the Union Army, and in Relief Work at Home, in Hospitals, Camps and at the Front during the War of the Rebellion. (1887)
- The Story of My Life: or, The Sunshine and Shadow of Seventy Years (1898)
More About Mary Ashton Livermore
A Strong-Minded Woman: The Life of Mary Livermore Biography by Wendy Venet
“Livermore, Mary Ashton Rice (1820-1905)” R
“Mary Ashton Rice Livermore (1820-1905) – American Suffragist and Social Reformer”
“Mary Livermore: A Legacy of Caring by Patricia M. Shields PDF Academia
Loyalty to right, truth, and duty must be the rules of our lives, personally as women–and the same is true of men–if we wish to know the highest peace, the completest satisfaction, to live with respect for ourselves, and as helpers to the struggling, straying, sorrowing world.
Mary Ashton Livermore What Shall We Do With Our Daughters? 1883, p. 122