ABSTRACT
Mary Rutherford Garrettson was the only child of Freeborn Garrettson, the famed itinerant preacher, and Catherine Livingston Garrettson, a devout and charitable convert to Methodism and daughter of one of the most prominent families among the colonial aristocracy of New York. She supported abolitionism, helped to fund churches, established a children's school, and published essays on religious subjects. In addition, she authored anonymously two children's Sunday School books, Little Mabel and Her Sunlit Home and Little Mabel's Friends. In order to understand fully the significance of Garrettson's writing and her commitment to religion and reform work, it is imperative to know that she had a form of dwarfism. Accounts written about Garrettson—both during her lifetime and shortly following her death—capture the many ways in which her commitment to service and reform paralleled that of other nineteenth-century evangelical women, including her mother.
