The pamphlet made her a public figure. She gave public lectures at important places: the First African Baptist Church and the African Meeting House, where the New England Anti-Slavery Society met. These were important venues, evidence that for a brief moment she commanded an audience. She mostly held forth on religious and moral questions, taking care, though, to address the “daughters of Africa,” thus expanding her community of listeners beyond men. She touted mothers’ influence on the little souls in their care—a staple of domestic ideology, which black women were turning to their own uses. But she also departed from the standard line about female moral influence to toss in grievances about black women’s destiny scrubbing pots and pans in the kitchens of haughty white women. “How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?”10
Stewart seems to have walked trustingly into a position that was inevitably embattled. At first, Garrison’s backing seems to have protected her from criticism: In 1831, God and Garrison were already a formidable pair. And the contemporaneous examples of a few itinerant black women preachers, respected and honored by Northern blacks, would have softened the audacity of putting herself before the public.11 But Stewart appears to have pushed beyond the role of preacher, to presume to speak to the community about worldly matters as well. Her status as a widow would have given her some protection from social ostracism for stepping out of place, but as she proceeded, her disinterest in the meek quietude of grief would have been obvious. From the defensiveness that flares up in her writing, we can infer that audiences grew hostile. She was in tune with advanced opinion about race and slavery, but she was far out in front of even the most advanced opinions about women.
Although there is no record of what her critics said, Stewart may have suffered from the bugaboo of Frances Wright, a radical British advocate of workingmen’s causes who had two years earlier scandalized America by defying the cultural prohibition against speaking before “promiscuous” audiences—that is, audiences that included men. Public space was male, and the only women who “exposed” themselves there were “public women” who were “on the town,” that is, prostitutes. On an 1829 lecture tour, the unabashedly showy Fanny Wright drew accusations of being a prostitute for her audacity; pornographic fantasies swirled around her presence at the podium, as if she were literally exposing her body to strange men. As for Stewart, a bitter sense of ill usage drove her to leave Boston in 1833. The object of her rage is unclear, but the tone is unmistakably aggrieved. “Thus far has my life been almost a life of complete disappointment,” she announced to her audience, blame suffusing the plaint.12
Over the course of her brief time in the limelight, her declamations on behalf of her sex moved front and center. In this she foreshadowed a line of black women to come who did not separate their commitments to the race from their grievances on their own behalf and whose experiences of black men’s indifference strengthened their defense of women. In Stewart’s last speech, she gave the topic undivided attention. “What if I am a woman?” she defiantly inquired. It was a resonant turn of phrase. Over the next three decades, abolitionist women would habitually use the inverted phrasing—not “I am a woman” but “what if I am?”—to defend themselves against charges that they had stepped out of their place. The language originated with the beautiful British female anti-slavery motto “Am I not a woman and a sister?” (analogue to the men’s “Am I not a man and a brother?”) and Stewart would have been echoing that query, already in the air. Over time, American women adapted, twisted, and rearranged the words, most famously when Sojourner Truth was said to have demanded at an 1850 women’s rights convention, “Arn’t I a woman?”13
Questioning Paul’s injunction—let the women keep silent in churches—Stewart insisted, “Did but St. Paul but know of our wrongs and deprivations, I presume he would make no objection to our pleading in public for our rights.”14 She threw at listeners her righteous biblical predecessors: Deborah the judge, Esther the savior of her people, and Mary Magdalene, who announced Christ’s resurrection to his disciples. The list, with a few additions, would reappear over the years in other briefs for the defense, a women’s rights roll of honor compiled as a record of divine sanction for women who stepped out of line. Yet there was a more surprising list of names in Stewart’s “Farewell”: great women of the Middle Ages and Renaissance who were notable not so much for their Christian virtue as for their wordly achievements.
Stewart found them in a history of women through the ages published in London in 1790, the marvelously titled Woman, Sketches of the History, Genius, Disposition, Accomplishments, Employments, Customs and Importance of the Fair Sex In All Parts Of The World Interspersed With Many Singular And Entertaining Anecdotes By A Friend Of The Sex. Wherever she unearthed the old book, which was written in the palmy days of the French Revolution, she thought the information about women’s upward course was important enough to copy straight into her own text. Through the lens of this book, optimism about the future banished her own afflictions in the present. An epoch of distinction for women was in the works, she predicted, and African-American women would be included. The past, after all, provided examples of magnificent figures of learning and independence who were honored in their own times: Anglo-Saxon seers, Greek oracles, Jewish prophetesses, and daredevils of Renaissance erudition who occupied university chairs of philosophy and advised popes. “Nuns were poetesses, and women of quality Divines,” she marveled, and demanded, “What if such women as are here described should rise among our sable race?” “It is not impossible,” she concluded.15 Caution tinted the hypothetical question—after all, her own experience as a “Divine” in the “sable race” did not bode well—but the conjecture still glimmered with hope in an otherwise gloomy assessment of the present.
Stewart was fundamentally a Christian thinker. Except for the tome on women’s history, the only book she used in her writing was the Bible. In all likelihood, she knew nothing about Mary Wollstonecraft or the demands women made in the French Revolution. Yet she benefited from the Age of Revolution’s massive authorization of new historical subjects such as “Woman.” She delighted in chronicling creatures of such importance that they could vie with kings and popes. An epic composed in 1790 could be adjusted to transform an impoverished black woman into a protagonist just arriving on the stage of history.
Across the Charles River in Cambridge, another young woman in quite different circumstances also contemplated the demands of the age. Margaret Fuller, ten years younger, lived in the same city yet worlds apart and no doubt knew nothing about Maria Stewart, so separate was black Boston from intellectual (white) Cambridge. Fuller was another reader but one blessed with the privileges of a strenuous education, loving parents, a white skin, and all the books her heart desired. Though they were unknown to each other, Fuller shared Maria Stewart’s sense that the times issued a special invitation; she thought about “such a person of Genius as the nineteenth century can afford.” Fuller imagined a genderless genius; Stewart, a female savante. Fuller depended on an untrammeled Soul; Stewart, on God. Fuller went on to become a brilliant transatlantic intellectual and revolutionary; Stewart dropped into obscurity.16 But at the time, both drew mental fortitude from imaginative possibilities generated by American reform movements. In these years when feminism was quiescent, Woman in the Nineteenth Century—as Fuller would later title a book—was already bent on what her celebrants believed to be a world-changing mission.
Maria Stewart and Margaret Fuller were creatures of a new era for female readers and writers. In the Northern states, rising rates of literacy had created a substantial female literary public (although few Southern white women and virtually no enslaved women were literate). Women readers and writers favored religious literature, fiction, and poetry, especially the sentimental effusions of women’s sphere. But they also read nonfiction, and the more forthright took up the great political subjects of the day—slavery, politi
cal representation, class inequality, and Woman.
Print culture was an entrée into the brothers’ deliberative affairs. Women made themselves active citizens of the republic of letters long before they were full citizens of the nation. Linked revolutions in transportation and printing technology vastly increased the number of books, newspapers, journals, pamphlets, and tracts available to ordinary people. The change rippled around the Atlantic but it was most marked in the United States, where neither the old guild organizations (as in Britain and on the Continent) nor censorship constrained the print media.17
Rising literacy was tied to a growing acceptance of women’s education. This change was the one solid institutional gain for women since the American Revolution, and still it was very limited. Between 1800 and 1820, ideas about republican motherhood strengthened the regimen in girls’ academies beyond the standard curriculum of a little French, a little music, and a little geography. Fuller, for example, was tutored by her father, Timothy, a believer in Wollstonecraft’s views on education. In the 1830s, basic education for both sexes spread with the establishment of common schools. Reformers also created a few secondary schools intent on offering girls an education equivalent to the best boys’ schools: Elizabeth Cady attended one, Emma Willard’s seminary in Troy, New York, where she graduated in 1832. Indeed, in the far future and around the globe, improved education for girls was often the first change that nascent women’s movements achieved, since reformers could pitch girls’ education as training future mothers for the nation’s service. In Iran in the 1910s, for instance, reformers established the first girls’ schools in the wake of the Constitutional Revolution, and in China the number of girls in school nearly tripled after the 1911 revolution.18
This is not to suggest there was steady progress in education in the United States or anywhere else. In 1840, Fuller, by then the preeminent female intellectual in the country, surveyed the American field and found it badly wanting. Girls’ schools had no interest in intellect or critical reasoning, she charged. There were two obstacles, she believed: men’s fear that education would strip women of their femininity and women’s own dislike of the life of the mind.19 Subsequent developments bore out the first, but not the second, since contrary to Fuller’s pessimism, girls and women consistently pressed for more rigorous, broad educations. But Fuller’s basic criticism held: Nowhere did education adhere to the principle that the mind had no sex. Once girls surmounted one barrier, skeptics threw up another.
In Fuller and Stewart’s time, they were thought to be incapable of learning Greek or Latin. Later, they could study Greek and Latin, but mathematics and science were deemed too taxing. In the twentieth century, biology was acceptable, but physics and engineering were far afield. And so on. Ohio’s Oberlin College, a hotbed of evangelical religion and abolitionism, was the first coeducational institution of higher learning anywhere in the world when it opened in 1833. Land-grant colleges, the bases for state universities, opened to women after the Civil War, and philanthropists established women’s colleges beginning with Mount Holyoke in 1837. Still, as late as 1900, many American universities slotted women into home economics courses (dressed up with the pseudoscientific label “euthenics”). And on both sides of the Atlantic, the great universities remained closed. In Britain, benefactors established women’s colleges at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge—against pitched resistance from the men—in the 1880s. After contentious discussions the students were allowed to sit for examinations, but they were not allowed to take degrees until 1920 and 1947, respectively.20 Yale and Princeton did not admit women until 1969.
Even so, versions of republican motherhood sifted down through the years, adulterating the belief that women deserved an education for their own sakes. When I went to Princeton in 1969 in the first class of women, a fellow “coed” explained to me that she was not there to advance herself but to educate herself to be a good wife and mother. And in 2005 the president of Harvard University, Larry Summers, set off a furor when, in an unguarded moment, he offered his opinion that women’s brains might be less capable of scientific research than men’s.21
On balance, though, gains in literacy and schooling strengthened women’s engagement in public issues. A constituency absorbed and pondered ideas with increased confidence in their own judgment: We see one expression in tens of thousands of women’s signatures on antislavery petitions to Congress.22
In the AASS, reading and writing brought women into dialogue and fellowship with men. Relationships on paper were less cumbersome and fraught with fear of exposure than actual encounters. Angelina Grimké came to public attention this way in The Liberator. Print launched her into a public career as an abolitionist orator, a move that touched off a storm of controversy and precipitated the first full-fledged discussion in the United States about the rights of women.
Angelina and her older sister Sarah were renegade daughters of a great South Carolina slaveholding family. Sarah was born in 1792; Angelina, the youngest girl of the family, in 1805. By the early 1830s, both were self-exiled from the South, living as antislavery Quakers in Philadelphia. They were old enough to be anomalous single women: In the calculus of their times, Angelina was approaching middle age and Sarah was already there, a certified spinster. The deeply religious sisters came to oppose slavery through a long, tortuous series of events, leaving behind their middle-of-the-road colonization sentiments when they joined the PFASS. In 1835, in response to a spate of mob attacks against abolitionists, Angelina sent Garrison a letter avowing her solidarity with the male victims and pledging her dedication to the cause—a cause worth dying for, she wrote. Such was the sensation of a planter’s daughter from a great Southern family allying herself with the radical wing of antislavery that other abolitionist papers reprinted the Liberator letter and the AASS published it as a pamphlet.23
Although the Quakers had led the antislavery fight in the United States since the eighteenth century, most Friends at the time, frightened by Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion, were backpedaling from the call for immediate emancipation.24 The Philadelphia Quakers, leery of Garrison’s red-hot views, pressed Angelina to repudiate the whole affair. Even her sister Sarah judged her badly for the unseemly attention she drew. Fortifying herself with prayer, Angelina stood firm even as she struggled against an undertow of terrible shame. The worst accusation, she felt, was that she brought disgrace on her family.
It was a pass at which other radical women would arrive, a turn in the road with bleakness and isolation up ahead and a dismayed gaggle of friends and family calling her to turn back. The psychology of a moment of radical choice affected every person who broke with the Northern consensus that slavery was an ineradicable institution. But for women, whose identities were so entangled with ensuring others’ well-being, the choice between the demands of conscience and the wishes of loved ones could be overwhelming. Female moral influence could only take one so far before it collapsed as a justification, with the transgressor stranded in the wilderness outside respectability. Usually, a steely faith was necessary to armor oneself against others’ disapproval and one’s own shame at having brought on so much trouble. For abolitionist women, that structure was Christianity. For rebels in the future, it would be socialism, or anarchism, or art, or feminism itself. As for Angelina, a pained letter to Sarah conveys the resolution she struggled for and found: “Tho’ condemnd by human judges, I was acquitted by him whom I believ qualifyed me to write it, & I feel willing to bear all, if it was only made instrumental of good. I felt my great unworthiness of being used in such a work but remembered that ‘God hath chosen the weak things of this world to confound the wise.’ ” Prayer shored up a female self that felt inadequate—literally too small—for the burden. She took confidence from God’s directions to her, a mere woman, to enter the battle whatever the costs.25
In the months after the scandal broke, invitations to speak to women’s groups proliferated. Angelina learned she was a strong and persuasive speaker. Sarah t
oo became convinced that the call to greater action came from God. In 1836, the sisters went to New York City to join the Seventy, an elite cadre of men the society had chosen to prepare for a blitz of agitation on the road for unconditional abolition. In New York, the Grimkés helped organize the first national convention of the female societies.
It was a valiant but dangerous idea. New York was a “withering atmosphere” for abolitionists, Sarah thought, its economy and tourist trade heavily dependent on the slaveholders who visited there to broker their cotton shipments. The Grimkés were appalled at the racism of the New York Female Antislavery Society, white women who treated their African-American co-workers like servants. At the convention, tensions pushed the subject of color prejudice into the proceedings. The meeting’s leaders—the Grimkés were prominent—insisted that the rights and duties of women included white women’s obligation to divest themselves of prejudice and treat black women as equals. Still, no black woman was asked to speak.26
In New York, the Grimkés moved to a larger stage. At first they spoke in parlors to women, white and black; when the audience grew too large, they moved to churches. While African-American listeners would have heard itinerant women preach before, most white people had literally never heard a woman stand up and talk in public except for testifying in revival meetings. Audiences were amazed at reasoned speeches coming from a woman. “My auditors literally sit some times with ‘mouths agape and eyes astare,’ ” Angelina reported, “so that I cannot help smiling in the midst of ‘rhetorical flourishes’ to witness their perfect amazement at hearing a woman speak in the churches.”27 Here and there, men slipped in to listen, turning the meetings into “promiscuous assemblies.” While the sisters anguished over their steps into prominence, they steadily proceeded. In New England in 1837, the sensation of turncoat Southern women lecturing on the evils of slavery drew hundreds—1,500 in Lowell, Massachusetts, where factory girls came in force. A sharp question took shape and pushed its way through the decorum of domesticity—really, why shouldn’t Christian women speak out publicly about the great evil of slavery? It edged into a corollary: Why shouldn’t they join men in deliberating about the affairs of the world when worldly power impinged on what was right? The point of departure was the absolute moral equality of all human beings, the fundamental principle abolitionists used to call for an end to slavery. The Grimkés and other women, following the logic, ran up against a stark contradiction. Was not sex, like skin color, a mere circumstance that had nothing to do with the moral equality of a person?
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