Crosshatch: Martha Schofield, the Forgotten Feminist (1839–1916)

Description

by Christina Larocco

Publication date: 15th of March 2025

If Louisa May Alcott had imagined a fifth March sister, she might have been a lot like activist and educator Martha Schofield (1839–1916): passionate about equality, determined to break free from the restrictions of nineteenth-century society, yearning equally for both purpose and love. Crosshatch follows Schofield from the Underground Railroad outposts of southeastern Pennsylvania to war-ravaged South Carolina. As an abolitionist, a women’s suffragist, and a white teacher of Black students, she spent a lifetime attempting to develop (however imperfectly) an antiracist feminist vision. Based on Schofield’s letters and diaries, Crosshatch provides unparalleled access to the intimate details of a nineteenth-century woman’s personal life: her love affairs with both women and men, her rocky mental and physical health, her thoughts as she watched wounded soldiers die after the Battle of Gettysburg or stared down Ku Klux Klan members during Reconstruction. More than a biography, Crosshatch uses Schofield’s life to make sense out of our own chaotic times. It is a testament to the power of history to shape our lives and to the urgency of listening to women’s voices, now and then.

Praise for Crosshatch: Martha Schofield, the Forgotten Feminist (1839–1916)

What makes, of our lives, a story? What stories are ours to write? These questions pulse across the pages of Crosshatch, a book of history and memoir, research and quest – a book, in other words, of gleaming mirrors. In the able hands of historian Christina Larocco, the feminist Martha Schofield emerges as a complex character, and also a complicated one – a perfect foil for our deeply complicated times and a brilliant companion for Larocco’s own most elegant mind.
— Beth Kephart, My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera

Crosshatch is a thoughtful blend of biography and personal essay, and a journey of revisiting well-known US history – this time through the eyes of a woman. Historian Christina Larocco’s care for the stories of women, often buried and ignored, is obvious in her treatment of Martha Schofield. Bringing to life the story of this lesser-known feminist in parallel to examining her own personal history, Christina interrogates how the past and present affect each other. Hers is a precise, sharp, and witty voice illuminating that history is made while we live out our everyday lives.
— Jana Marlies Maron Nonfiction Book Coach, Editor & Publisher of Under the Gum Tree