Maria Miller Stewart
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| Hartford native, political activist and orator, first American-born woman to address a mixed gender audience.
The child of African born parents, Maria Miller was "bound out" to a local minister at the age of five. At 16 she began her education in "Sabbath Schools" and eventually moved to Boston where she married James W. Stewart. He died three years later leaving her childless and widowed at the age of 26. Unable to collect the inheritance Stewart had left her, she turned to lecturing before paying audiences, though at the time "Negro speakers" were virtually unknown and it was considered unseemly for women to address audiences that included men.
Evangelical in style, and soon known as a bold and militant orator, Stewart called on all black Americans to develop racial pride, unity and self-improvement through the expansion of educational and occupational rights. She also spoke out against the controversial colonization movement to expatriate black Americans to West Africa . In 1831 she responded to William Lloyd Garrison's call for women to support the abolitionist cause with a collection of political tracts, Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality , which he published in The Liberator . Several decades later Garrison helped Stewart gain a pension to which she was entitled as the widow of a soldier from the War of 1812. With this money she was able to publish her collected speeches and writings, Mediations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1879). Despite Stewart's early success as a lecturer on behalf of abolition and the need for education for African American men and women, she was criticized for the boldness of her speeches and for violating the taboo against women appearing on public platforms. In 1833 she moved to New York City , where she joined a Female Literacy Society and later taught black children, though at a fraction of the salary paid white teachers. She also continued to speak out eloquently on behalf of education: "let our money be appropriated for schools and seminaries of learning for our children," she wrote, for "our young men and maidens are fainting and drooping by the way-side for the want of knowledge." Stewart spent her last years in Washington , D.C. In 1871 she founded a Sunday School, not far from the Freedman's Hospital where she died. She left behind no photographs or other documentation of her life other than her writings. | |||||||||||
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