Daughters of the Puritans

Seth Curtis Beach was a Unitarian minister who spent most of his working life in New England parishes, and in 1905 he gathered seven short lives of women he counted as heirs of the Puritans: Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Mary Lovell Ware, Lydia Maria Child, Dorothea Lynde Dix, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Louisa May Alcott. The chapters move from childhood and religious formation to the work each name is attached to, Child’s antislavery Appeal, Dix’s campaign for the insane shut up in jails and almshouses, Fuller’s years at the New York Tribune, Stowe’s novel, Alcott’s pen paying her father’s debts. Beach quotes letters and journals at length and admires his subjects openly. What survives is a warm group portrait and a record of how one clergyman of 1905 measured what these women had won.