Growing up in Boston's Gilded Age: The Journal of Alice Stone Blackwell, 1872-1874

by Marlene Deahl Merrill

In 1872, when Alice Stone Blackwell was 14 years old, she began a diary. The only child of women's rights leaders Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, Alice was a lively, wilful, intellectually precocious girl who tried to carve out her own identity while growing up in the midst of the strong personalities and commitments of her family and their Boston circle. Her two year journal, edited, annotated, and introduced by Marlene Deahl Merrill, is both an account of adolescence and a historically significant document about the popular culture, family life and reform issues of the Victorian era. Alice describes Boston's problems of traffic, commuting and crime, the everyday routines of her upper-middle class homelife (emptying slops, making pie tarts and chemises, and trying home remedies for various ailments), and her school activities, classmates, and teachers. She depicts important suffrage and literary events that she attends with her family, and she bristles with opinions on the many notables who were her parents' friends. We meet "unpleasant looking" Louisa May Alcott and learn that she wears a corset (and is thus on the "wrong side" of the dress reform issue); we hear that William Lloyd Garrison's warmth and love of cats appeal to Alice so much that she turns to his poetry to know him better. Through this diary we see Alice developing from an awkward adolescent to a more self-possessed young woman while facing many of the same concerns and feelings that beset young people today. We also see the roots of her later adult career as a formidable editor, suffragist, and social activist.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

290 pages, Hardcover

First published November 28, 1990

Reviews

[Kate]

Delighted to have found this book on Goodreads. I read this around 2004, and still remember her descriptions of her family's bad-smelling privy, and her opinions of her classmates and their dresses and hair ribbons. This is a lively little journal, and a fun look into the times.

[Kate]

This is the diary of Alice Stone Blackwell, daughter of two prominent woman's suffragists, from ages 14-16. The family lived just outside Boston and the book is her daily journal entries. It's a delightful account of daily life in the early 1870s. Though she was surrounded by progressive political happenings, it centers on Alice's trials and tribulations as an adolescent.