Laura Curtis Bullard collection, 1981

Full finding aid (pdf)

Collection Scope and Content

This collection includes a review and a reproduction photograph; also a biographical sketch.

Biographical/Historical Note

Laura Curtis Bullard was born in Freedom, Maine in 1831 to Lucy and Jeremiah Curtis. The family had a business selling the popular Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, a morphine-based tonic used for aches and pains. In the early 1850s, Jeremiah moved the successful business and the family to New York City.

Laura Curtis Bullard published her first novel, Now-a-days!, by the age of 23. Two years later, in 1856, she published the novel Christine: or, Woman’s Trials and Triumphs. She began editing her own newspaper, The Ladies Visitor, and Drawing Room Companion, which was published monthly from 1855 until 1861. In 1859 she married Enoch Bullard; they had one son. By the late 1860s she had taken on an active role in women’s rights organization and befriended Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Theodore Tilton. She was briefly editor-in-chief of the women’s rights newspaper The Revolution, founded by Susan B. Anthony in 1868. She continued to live in New York and died there in 1912 at the age of 81.