IN RECENT YEARS, feminist criticism has re-
stored Lydia Maria Child to her rightful place next to Harriet
Beecher Stowe as perhaps the second-most widely read and in-
fluential writer and reformer of the mid-nineteenth century.
She has been heralded with virtually inventing several prose
genres, among them American children's literature, the journal-
istic sketch, and the domestic advice book. ¹ However, along
with Stowe, the antislavery activist and writer has been assailed
for succumbing to romantic racialism in her representations of
black characters. While she did not invent the tradition that has
relied upon the “tragic mulatto, ” no nineteenth-century writer
was more instrumental in the trope's proliferation and circula-
tion. ² Whether in short stories for abolitionist giftbooks and lit-
erary magazines of the day or in such novels as A Romance of
the Republic, Child was famous for making use of the refined,
mixed-race slave to garner support first for emancipation and
then for civil and social acceptance. In critical assessments today,
Child is seen as a prime example of writers who, in Jean Fagan
Yellin's words, allowed “white readers to identify with the vic-
tim by gender while distancing themselves by race and thus to
avoid confronting a racial ideology that denies the full humanity
of nonwhite women. ” ³ That is, the mulatta narrative encouraged

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