Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-b6zl4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-15T11:07:08.019Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - Nineteenth-century African American women writers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

By
John Ernest
Edited by
Dale M. Bauer
John Ernest
Affiliation:
West Virginia University
Dale M. Bauer
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Get access

Summary

“O, ye daughters of Africa, awake! awake! arise!” (Stewart, Productions, 6). So wrote Maria Stewart in an 1831 pamphlet titled Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality. Stewart is today celebrated as a pioneering black feminist writer and activist, a woman who not only awoke and arose but also was so critical of African American women and men of her time that she soon found herself frustrated and isolated as a woman who spoke beyond her station in life. After publishing her pamphlet, Stewart presented four lectures in Boston that were then published in white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's antislavery newspaper The Liberator. Garrison's support aside, Stewart's work did not meet with an especially warm reception, and she soon moved to New York, where she published her complete work, Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1835) and became a school teacher. Her teaching continued through the Civil War – at that time, located in Washington, DC, and devoted to children of families that had escaped from slavery. Later, she became the matron of the Freedmen's Hospital and Asylum in Washington, DC. Throughout her life, Stewart pressed against the restrictions that African Americans faced in the nineteenth century, and promoted especially the cause, and the responsibilities, of African American women. “How long,” she asked, “shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?” (16).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature , pp. 273 - 292
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Buell, Lawrence. New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980.Google Scholar
Delaney, Lucy A. From the Darkness Cometh the Light or Struggles for Freedom. In Six Women's Slave Narratives. Ed. Andrews, William L.. The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Drumgoold, Kate. A Slave Girl's Story, Being an Autobiography of Kate Drumgoold. In Six Women's Slave Narratives. Ed. Andrews, William L.. The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Erica Armstrong. A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, Laura F. Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Foreman, Gabrielle P. Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Foster, Frances Smith. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Fulton, DoVeanna S. Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women's Narratives of Slavery. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend. “The Politics of ‘Silence’: Dual-Sex Political Systems and Women's Traditions of Conflict in African-American Religion.” In African-American Christianity: Essays in History. Ed. Johnson, Paul E.. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Hull, Gloria T., Scott, Patricia Bell, and Smith, Barbara. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies. New York: The Feminist Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Ed. Fagan Yellin, Jean. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Keckley, Elizabeth. Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. Ed. Smith Foster, Frances. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Lauter, Paul. “Is Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Good Enough to Teach?” Legacy 5.1 (1988):.Google Scholar
McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reilly, John M. “History-Making Literature.” In Studies in Black American Literature, Volume II: Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literary Criticism. Ed. Weixlmann, Joe and Fontenot, Chester J.. Greenwood, FL: Penkevill, 1986.Google Scholar
Santamarina, Xiomara. Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Stewart, Maria W. Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart. In Spiritual Narratives. Ed. Houchins, Sue E.. The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Thompson, L. S.The Story of Mattie Jackson; Her Parentage – Experience of Eighteen Years in Slavery – Incidents During the War – Her Escape from Slavery. A True Story. In Six Women's Slave Narratives. Ed. Andrews, William L.. The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Waters, Kristin and Conaway, Carol B., eds. Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds. Burlington, VT: University of Vermont Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Young, Elizabeth. Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×