Born at a time of national and familial conflict and to a heritage that embodied social change, Perkins grew up to be a key social activist, and so prolific a writer that she approximated her publications to be the equivalent of twenty-five volumes of writing, an estimate closely substantiated by Gary Scharnhorst's 1985 bibliography of her work.
All of Lyman Beecher's offspring except one made their mark as activists, suffragists, educators, writers, ministers, or lawyers. "The only purely private Beecher," Lyman Beecher Stowe wrote in his Saints, Sinners, and Beechers (1934), "was Charlotte's grandmother Mary, Lyman and [first wife] Roxanna's fourth child." Mary stayed out of the public eye, confining herself to the traditional domestic role. She married Thomas Perkins, and they had four children: Charlotte's father, Frederick; Emily; Charles; and Katherine. Their daughters married well--Emily to the eminent writer and Unitarian clergyman, Edward Everett Hale, best known for his short story "The Man without a Country," first published in the Atlantic Monthly (December 1863). Katherine married William C. Gilman, a prominent attorney. One of their children, George Houghton Gilman, Perkins's first cousin, later became her second husband.
Of Mary Beecher Perkins's four children, the eldest, Frederick, had the most difficult time making his way in life.
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