Women of the Week

Author and poet Kate Slaughter McKinney and author Lydia Maria Child are this week's Women of the Week.   

•  To learn about them by viewing their items, please click on their images.  

• To read their biographical sketches in A Woman of the Century, please click on the highlighted page numbers to the left of their images.

Author and poet Kate Slaughter McKinney was born in London, Kentucky, on February 6, 1857.  By 1870, her family lived in Kirksville, Kentucky.  Interested in writing from an early age, she published her first work at fifteen in the Louisville Courier-Journal.  Kate graduated from Daughters' College in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, in 1876.

On May 6, 1878, Kate married James I. McKinney.  In 1880, the couple lived in Richmond, Kentucky.  The McKinneys made their home in Mount Vernon, Illinois, in the late 1880s. She published a book of poetry, Katydid's Poems, in 1887.

In the early 1890s, Kate and James moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where they lived for many years.  She continued to publish into the twentieth century.

Kate passed away in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 2, 1939.

Lydia Maria Child was born on February 11, 1802, in Medford, Massachusetts.  She gained early readers through her fiction, her biographies, and her periodical, Juvenile Miscellany.  She bravely risked her established reputation in support of the anti-slavery cause in 1833.  Lydia's An Appeal in favor of that class of Americans called Africans brought her intense, yet mixed, public attention.  The next year, she again toiled for the cause by editing The Oasis.
 
Throughout her life, Lydia continued both her reform work and her writing.  She authored several more books and contributed to periodicals such as Ladies' Repository, Living Age, and The United States Democratic Review.  "Harriet E. Hosmer. A Biographical Sketch," Lydia's contribution to the January 1861 volume of Ladies' Repository, focused on Hosmer, another woman in A Woman of the Century.

In addition to Hosmer, Child's large personal network included Rosa Miller Avery,  Dr. Martha H. Mowry, and John Greenleaf Whittier.

Lydia passed away in Wayland, Massachusetts, on October 20, 1880, and was buried in that town's North Cemetery.