Mary Ashton Rice Livermore

Mary Ashton Rice Livermore (1820-1905) was an American reformer, journalist, and lecturer, born in Boston. Raised a Calvinist, she embraced Universalism and in 1845 married the Universalist minister Daniel P. Livermore, becoming associate editor of his Chicago paper The New Covenant. During the Civil War she was a principal organizer of the northwestern branch of the United States Sanitary Commission, overseeing relief for Union hospitals and helping mount the 1863 Northwestern Sanitary Fair. She afterward became one of the country's best-known platform lecturers and suffrage leaders, founding the paper The Agitator, helping edit the Woman's Journal, and serving as president of the American Woman Suffrage Association. Her autobiography, The Story of My Life, appeared in the late 1890s; she died in Melrose, Massachusetts, in 1905.

The autobiography of the most famous woman American Universalism produced. Mary Livermore taught on a Virginia plantation (which made her an abolitionist), married the Universalist minister and editor Daniel Livermore, organized vast soldiers' relief operations for the Sanitary Commission during the Civil War, and afterward became one of the nation's leading suffrage lecturers. Her memoir of 'the sunshine and shadow of seventy years' is both a life of reform and a portrait of the Universalist milieu that sustained it.

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