MARIA STEWART IS AMERICA'S FIRST FEMINIST

"O ye daughters of Africa, awake! awake! arise! no longer sleep nor slumber but distinguish yourselves. Show forth to the world that ye are endowed with noble and exalted faculties...How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?...How long shall a mean set of men flatter us with their smiles, and enrich themselves with our hard earnings: their wives' fingers sparkling with rings and they themselves laughing at our folly?"

Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1971/womens-liberation.htm

Maria Stewart became part of Boston's small free black middle class upon marrying James W Stewart in 1826, a shipping agent " [She] became involved in some of the institutions founded by that black community, including the Massachusetts General Colored Association, which worked for immediate abolition of slavery."


Her husband died some 3 years after they married. As she was both female and black, white executors were able to take the property her husband left her. 

A famous abolitionist she admired, David Walker, died six months later, and Stewart had a religious conversion. She felt that she was called by God to be a warrior for freedom. Shortly after that Stewart responded to a white abolitionist's advertisement for black women writers. 

Stewart wrote articles for William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator. By 1831, Garrison published Stewart's first essay, "Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality" as a pamphlet --though he misspelled her last name as "Steward."

Feeling called by God, Maria Stewart spoke first to an audience black women then an audience of men and women together. And she did so even though it was still scandalous for women to speak in public at the time, 

Her speeches and writings came to be about the intersectional forces of racism, classism, and sexism as they bore down on women. In the early 1830s, this makes Maria W Stewart the first woman, of any color, to speak publicly on women's rights

The white feminist movement would not begin until 1848 in Seneca Falls but Stewart was already advocating that women get an education and be able to provide for themselves more than a decade earlier. She thought it was critical that black women bring their share of brains and ingenuity to the movement to end slavery.

In 1833, Stewart was bowed by the pressure to stop speaking publicly.  But Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Ida B Wells would come after her and carry on the tradition of speaking truth to power  - be they white male, white woman, or black male.

next: the erasure of Stewart's feminism