Livermore, Mary A. (Mary Ashton), 1820-1905

<p>Mary A. Livermore, like many Anglo-American middle-class homemakers in both the North and the South, expanded her voluntary charitable and benevolent work during the Civil War in the United States (1861–65). In the process, she discovered that she had exceptional organizational capabilities, that she could endure the hardships and hazards of unprecedented geographic mobility, and that she could very effectively influence others through public speaking. Mary Livermore is, therefore, representative of the large numbers of married women who came away from their experiences in the war with new self-confidence and a determination to increase their participation in the public educational, social and political life of American society. She is particularly noteworthy for her popularity and for her persistence in campaigning for a broad range of reforms to equalize opportunities for women.</p>

<p>Mary, named for a maternal aunt, was born Mary Ashton Rice in 1820 on Salem Street in the North End of Boston, several doors from Old North Church. Her sister, Rachel Rice , was born three years later, and another sister, Abbie Rice , was born when Mary was seven or eight years old. Two brothers and a sister had died before Mary was born, making the three sisters the only children born to the Rices to survive infancy.</p>

<p>A serious child, Mary seems always to have been a voracious reader. Even before she began attending dame's school, she learned to read. Sometimes, however, reading led her into trouble. On her eighth birthday, she received her first book, Robinson Crusoe, from her Aunt Mary; although reading was not allowed on Sunday, she could not resist devouring it immediately, and consequently the book was burned by her parents before the end of the day. While she was in grammar school at the Hancock School in Boston, her unusually mature ideas and writing style caused her English teacher to accuse her of plagiarism.</p>

<p>At age 14½, two years earlier than expected, she was awarded a Benjamin Franklin medal, a sign that she had successfully completed the highest level of public education offered for girls. During a four-month apprenticeship in dressmaking, she gained the satisfaction of acquiring a practical skill, but she was elated when her parents arranged for her to continue her formal education at Miss Whiting's Seminary, a Baptist school at Charlestown (1836–38). Following her first term, she became a teaching assistant, a position which not only assured that she would be able to pay her tuition at the school but also allowed her, much to her pride, to achieve her longstanding desire for economic independence from her parents. An eager student, she completed the four-year course of study in only two years and was offered a position to stay on as an instructor in French, Latin, and later Italian.</p>

<p>While Mary was at the seminary in Charlestown, her sister Rachel died. In her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1897), Mary described this crisis as a "pivotal point" in her life. It caused her to reject the severe exclusionary doctrines of Calvinism which she had been taught by her father's Baptist church and to look for a theology that better suited her belief in a loving and compassionate God. Her sister's death also encouraged her to leave her family and the familiar surroundings of New England in an effort to move on from the tragedy to a more hopeful future. After Mary left home, her parents adopted an orphaned two-year-old, Annie.</p>

<p>Mary then lived as a governess with the Henderson family on their Virginia plantation for three years (1839–42). Her lively account of this time is rich with fresh, balanced observation, humor and unconventional attitudes on both the education of her young charges and on life among whites and blacks involved in the system of slavery. "I learned while in Virginia, that ethical greatness and a high order of character are to be found among people of all sects, and of no sect, and thenceforth placed character higher than creed," she wrote in her autobiography.</p>

<p>Mary Livermore, born Mary Ashton Rice, (December 19, 1820 – May 23, 1905) was an American journalist, abolitionist, and advocate of women's rights.</p>

<p>When the American Civil War broke out, she became connected with the United States Sanitary Commission, headquarters at Chicago, performing a vast amount of labor of all kinds—organizing auxiliary societies, visiting hospitals and military posts, contributing to the press, answering correspondence, and other things incident to the work done by that institution. She was one of those that helped organize the great fair in 1863, at Chicago, when nearly US$100,000 was raised, and for which she obtained the original draft of the Emancipation Proclamation from President Lincoln, which was sold for $3,000.</p>

<p>When the war was over she instituted a paper called the Agitator, which was afterwards merged in the Woman's Journal. Of this, she was editor for two years and a frequent contributor thereafter. On the lecture platform, she had a remarkable career, speaking mostly in behalf of women's suffrage and the temperance movements. Many years, she traveled 25,000 miles (40,000 km) annually, speaking five nights each week for five months of the year.</p>

<p>Her printed volumes included: <i>Thirty Years Too Late</i>, first published in 1847 as a prize temperance tale, and republished in 1878; <i>Pen Pictures; or, Sketches from Domestic Life, What Shall We Do with Our Daughters? Superfluous Women, and Other Lectures, 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</i>. For <i>Women of the Day</i>, she wrote the sketch of the sculptress, Miss Anne Whitney; and for the <i>Centennial Celebration of the First Settlement of the Northwestern States, at Marietta, Ohio, July 15, 1788</i>, she delivered the historical address.</p>

<p>Mary Livermore was a true 19th-century reformer. Born Mary Ashton Rice in Boston on December 19, 1820, she attended school at an all-female seminary in Charlestown, Massachusetts. After her graduation in 1836, she stayed on as a teacher for two years. But it was not until she served as a tutor for a wealthy family in Virginia that Mary began to form liberal ideas. From 1839 to 1842, she lived on the family's plantation. There, she witnessed the horrors of slavery — and became an enemy of the institution.</p>

<p>After her marriage to Daniel P. Livermore, a Universalist minister, Mary began to write for newspapers. Most of her writings called for religious and temperance reform. Livermore and her husband moved to Chicago in 1857 and began a long stint of editing a Unitarian paper called the New Covenant.</p>

<p>After the outbreak of the Civil War, Mary Livermore worked as a volunteer with the Chicago Sanitary Commission. This was a local branch of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, an organization approved by the government in 1861 that provided medical care and other services to Union soldiers where and when the government could not. The commission worked to send food, clothing and medical supplies to soldiers in the field. It also assisted the wounded after some of the war's most deadly battles, including the bloody battle at Shiloh, Tennessee where Ulysses S. Grant made his reputation.</p>

<p>The doctors and inspectors of the Sanitary Commission were men. But the local chapters of the organization were almost solely made up of women like Mary Livermore and Annie Wittenmyer. Among their other duties, these women collected blankets, food, and clothing and assembled them into care packages, trying to provide a "box a month for the soldiers."</p>

<p>The women of the Sanitary Commission also raised large sums of money to support their efforts. They organized fundraising fairs that lasted for weeks and produced thousands of dollars for supplies for the army. Mary Livermore herself was the chief organizer of the Sanitary Fair of October 1863. The fair raised $70,000 -- a huge sum at the time. The fair also helped convince other women to support the commission's efforts.</p>

<p>Mary's work on the Sanitary Commission helped convince her that in order for social reforms to take place, women needed suffrage, or the right to vote. After the war, she donated her time and leadership skills to women's organizations including the American Woman Suffrage Association and the Women's Christian Temperance Union. She served as president of the suffrage group from 1875 to 1878. She also wrote for numerous reform periodicals and spoke on behalf of liberal causes all over the country. Her death in 1905 marked an end to a long and fruitful career of public service.</p>