Mary Morris Knowles: Poet, Artist, and Anti-Slavery Activist

Mary Morris Knowles, Artist and Activist (died 3 February 1807)

The daughter of prosperous Quaker parents, Moses and Mary Morris, the younger Mary Morris, born in Rugeley (Staffordshire) on 5 May 1733, was "carefully brought up in substantial and useful knowledge," according to one contemporary account. As she would demonstrate in her later life, she knew the classics well enough to cite them, she could write poetry, she could understand current scientific theories, she was familiar with botany, and she was fluent in French.

Mary Knowles, self-portrait in needlework
Royal Collection Trust

She would later write that when she was young, she was sometimes regarded as a "romantic chatter-brain" by her Rugeley neighbors, a description that belies her intellect, accomplishments, and activism.

Also said to be "the great beauty of Staffordshire," she would later downplay her appearance by describing herself as "a damsel of middle stature, and ruddy complexion," comparing herself to a milkmaid who is "blue" on a "frosty morning."

Her sense of humor and self-deprecation were accompanied by her determination. As a young woman, she resisted her parents’ authority to arrange  her marriage, declining a husband of her parents’ choice and insisting on her right to choose her own husband--which she eventually did. Her resistance, however, brought her into conflict not only with her parents but with important Quaker authorities.

In her satirical autobiography, Memoir of M. M., Spinster of this Parish, she reiterated her view of marriage: she planned to "bestow the treasure of my inestimable Self on some lucky, happy individual, as a very proper and suitable help meet."

Which is presumably what she did when she finally married in 1767, at the age of thirty-four. Her husband, Thomas Knowles, was also a Quaker, an apothecary by trade. Although she had consented to be a "proper and suitable help meet," at last, Mary Morris Knowles also made it clear that she did not intend to be "a poor passive machine . . . a mere smiling Wife."

But some aspects of marriage were unavoidable for an eighteenth-century women, no matter how determined or independent. The birth of her first child in July 1768 nearly killed her--and the baby, a boy, lived only a day. She wrote movingly of her experiences in letters and in poetry.

After this traumatic labor and delivery, Mary Knowles began creating embroidered pictures, her needlework an example of "needle painting," a technique "so highly finished, that it has all the softness and effect of painting."

As Knowles described her art, "my employment is working in divers colours, and fine-twined woolen, and it is work of curious devices, and of exquisite cunning in the art of the needle." She also produced "printwork"--she drew pictures onto silk or linen, then worked these images with lines of fine black silk stitches so that the finished piece looked like an engraving.

By 1771, Knowles's reputation as an artist had drawn the attention of Queen Charlotte, who commissioned Knowles to produce a needle painting of a portrait of George III. Knowles's version of Johann Zoffanny's portrait of the king brought her praise and an excellent "gift" (rather than a commission) from the queen--indicating that the relationship was personal rather than professional.

However the payment was regarded, it allowed Mary Knowles to fund her husband's training to become a doctor. After Thomas Knowles completed his education, the couple settled in London. He was successful in his career, while Mary Knowles developed a circle of literary and political friends and associates. At the age of forty, she also gave birth to a boy.

In London, Knowles became an active supporter of the abolitionist movement. She also met a young woman named Jane Harry--the daughter of an English planter and a Jamaican woman. After she converted to Quakerism, Harry's British guardian cut ties with her, and the young woman came to live with Knowles.

Knowles's argument for religious toleration--her support for Harry's decision to convert from Anglicanism to Quakerism--brought her into conflict with Samuel Johnson. James Boswell's account of their debate has, as Judith Jennings notes in her study of Knowles, had a long and negative effect on Knowles's reputation.

1803 engraving of
Mary Knowles
National Portrait Gallery

When Thomas Knowles died in 1786, he left a considerable estate, inherited by his wife. She did not remarry. She did continue her activism, and she also continued to write. In addition to her earlier autobiography and poetry, as well as the tract entitled "Compendium of a Controversy on Water-Baptism," she collected "A Poetic Correspondence" (between herself and a Captain Morris," and produced more tracts and poems supporting her political views. While most of these were circulated in manuscript, she eventually published her account of her dispute with Samuel Johnson, "Dialogue between Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Knowles" (1791).

Mary Morris Knowles died at the age of seventy-three on 3 February 1807.

My own interest in Mary Knowles began with her needle-painting--I came across her name when I was reading about the needle-painter Mary Linwood. I had no idea about her literary and political endeavors. Interestingly, however, there seems to be nothing much written about her artwork after her completion of the painting of George III.

Frances Wright, Abolitionist and Reformer

Frances Wright, Social Reformer, Writer, and Lecturer (born 6 September 1795)

Frances Wright was born in Dundee, Scotland, the daughter of Camilla Campbell and James Wright, a "free-thinking radical and revolutionary." Whatever direct influence her father may have had on her thinking is limited, however--by the time that she was three years old, both of her parents had died.

An 1824 portrait of a young Frances Wright,
painted by George Inman

But, in addition to his radical political views, James Wright was also a wealthy manufacturer, so his children were not left as impoverished orphans after the loss of their parents.

With a significant inheritance, James Wright's two daughters were taken to England by their maternal aunt, who was their guardian. Since she herself was young, the girls lived with their aunt in their maternal grandfather's home.

Fanny Wright returned to Scotland when she was sixteen and was educated there by her great-uncle, James Milne, a moral philosopher. Milne was educated at the University of St. Andrews and was teaching at the University of Glasgow.

In Scotland, Fanny Wright spent her winters studying and writing, her summers in the Scottish highlands. She read widely, having access to the library of the university--she was particularly interested in reading about America and the American Revolution.

She also began to write, beginning with what is described as "youthful romantic verse." But in August 1818, when she was twenty-three years old, Fanny Wright sailed for America with her sister, Camilla, for a two-year tour of the United States. In New York, she produced her play Altorf: A Tragedy, dramatizing the struggle for Swiss independence. (The play was published the following year in Philadelphia.) 

Once she returned to Scotland, she published an account of her trip, Views of Society and Manners in America (1821) and A Few Days in Athens (1822), which has been described as "a novelistic sketch of a disciple of Epicurus that outlined the materialistic philosophy to which she adhered throughout her life." 

Her account of her American trip earned her praise and attention--in particular that of the Marquis de Lafayette, whom she met in France in 1821. She accompanied the Revolutionary War hero when he returned to America in 1824, and she traveled with him when he was entertained by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

Wright had been shocked to witness the brutality of slavery on her first visit to the United States. When she returned, it was with the purpose of purchasing, educating, and emancipating slaves, establishing them in a community outside of the United States. As she remarked while traveling in Mississippi in 1825, “The sight of slavery is revolting everywhere. But to inhale the impure breath of its pestilence in the free winds of America is odious beyond all that imagination can conceive.”

The image of Frances Wright that appears in
Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al.,
A History of Woman Suffrage

While planning the community for freed slaves, Wright had visited Robert Owen's utopian community of New Harmony, in Indiana.

She was impressed by Owen's ideas about cooperative labor and universal education--these notions formed the basis of the community she established, the Nashoba Commune, just outside Memphis, Tennessee.

She also published a tract outlining her proposal for ending slavery: A Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in the United States Without Danger of Loss to the Citizens of the South.

Nashoba was founded in 1826, but the initial optimism underlying its foundation was lost after Wright herself left, suffering from bouts of fever and still campaigning for support.

The trustees in whose hands she had placed the organizing and running of the community seem to have failed her--there were reports of floggings, sexual misconduct, and unhappiness of parents who lost control of their children. The community had collapsed by 1829, and Wright escorted the remaining emancipated slaves to Haiti, settling them there with promises for their freedom and independence.

(As an interesting note: in order to recover her health, Frances Wright had gone back to England--there she met Frances Trollope, about whom I have posted [click here]. Trollope returned with Wright to Nashoba, but she was shocked by conditions, disillusioned with the project, and soon left.)

Returning to the United States, Wright rejoined Owen and, with him, began publishing the Free Enquirer, a newspaper advocating equal rights for women, women's suffrage, education for women, birth control, and liberalized divorce laws. She also condemned capital punishment and worked toward educational reform--with Owen, she argued for the establishment of a system of free state boarding schools offering a religion-free curriculum and industrial skills in addition to traditional subjects. 

Also with Owen, she founded the Working Men's Party, supporting small farmers, artisans, and workers in early factories in New York. Those opposing this progressive party gave it the most insulting name they could devise: the Fanny Wright Party.

In 1831, her sister Camilla's health failing, Frances Wright returned to France. There she married a French physician, Guillaume D'Arusmont, whom she had met when they were at New Harmony. The couple had a child, Frances Sylva, born in 1832. The family returned to the United States in 1835 and took up residence in Cincinnati. But by then the marriage failed, and Wright began the long process of divorce.

In the mean time, after her return to the United States, Frances Wright delivered public lectures opposing slavery. In 1836 and 1838 she campaigned actively for the Democratic Party, She also became involved in the Popular Health Movement, in particular arguing for the inclusion of women in health and medicine. 

In 1836 she published her last book, Course of Popular Lectures, again arguing strongly for the rights of women: 

However novel it may appear, I shall venture the assertion, that, until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike, assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly. It is in vain that we would circumscribe the power of one half of our race, and that half by far the most important and influential. If they exert it not for good, they will for evil; if they advance not knowledge, they will perpetuate ignorance. Let women stand where they may in the scale of improvement, their position decides that of the race. 

Wright's health failed again after her efforts in the 1838 elections, and she withdrew from her active life. 

In 1850 she was finally divorced from her husband, but it came at a particularly high cost. Given divorce laws, which Wright had fought to reform, her earnings from her lectures and royalties belonged to her husband. 

She died just two years later, on 13 December 1852, after a fall on the ice. She was fifty-seven years old.

Wright was buried in Spring Grove Cemetery,
Cincinnati, Ohio

In addition to the entry on Wright in the Tennessee Encyclopedia, to which I've linked above, you might also be interested in the biographical note on Wright in the Encyclopedia Britannica (click here).

Celia Morris Eckhardt's 1984 biography, Fanny Wright: Rebel in America, is out of print, but used copies are readily available.

Wright's own work is also easy to find. There are a number of print-on-demand editions available (through Amazon, for instance), but her work work is available the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg.

Annabella Milbanke Was Not Crazy!

Annabella Milbanke, Lady Byron (17 May 1792-16 May 1860)

I've written before about the seminar in the British Romantics I was enrolled in as an undergraduate. The professor was a retired specialist in the writers of the period--he was a wonderful man, teaching the seminar gratis because he loved teaching. And I loved the course--but the approach was typical for its time. Tortured men of genius bedeviled by difficult women who threatened their genius. Any and all extremely bad behavior--and there was a great deal of it--was excused because THEY WERE MEN OF GENIUS.  

Annabella Milbanke,
about the time of her marriage

And I've already written about one of those "dangerous" women, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, a sixteen-year-old who was seduced by and eloped with the married Percy Shelley.

I've written about the "unhinged" Lady Caroline Lamb who stalked Byron.

I also wrote about my enlightenment about the women in the so-called Shelley circle after I read Janet Todd's Death and the Maiden: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle.

Even so, I hadn't considered Anna Isabella Milbanke, the young woman who married Byron. Without even thinking about it, I had been hanging onto the stereotype of Annabella, as she was known, which I had absorbed in that long-ago seminar. Annabella was the uptight, prudish, "Princess of Parallelograms" who just didn't understand a man of genius like Byron. Sheesh. (Byron himself referred to her as Clytemnestra, the monstrous wife who murdered Agamemnon in his bath when he returned from the Trojan wars.)

I have just finished Julia Markus's excellent new biography, Lady Byron and Her Daughters. I can't recommend it enough. 

The biography was not only compulsively readable, but it revealed a woman who was, in her own right, remarkable. Not remarkable only for her beauty, not remarkable as the discarded wife of Byron, not remarkable for the juicy details of her abusive marriage, but remarkable as a creative, talented thinker who accomplished a great deal in her life.

I will only summarize here--recognizing their daughter’s intellect, her parents provided an excellent tutor, with whom she studied classical literature, philosophy, science, and mathematics. She herself wrote poetry. She educated her accomplished, brilliant daughter, Ada, now recognized for her contributions to computing and computer programming. 

Annabella Milbanke not only devoted herself to rearing her daughter, she also offered financial support to Augusta Leigh, Byron's half-sister, and she rescued, supported, and educated Medora Leigh, Byron's daughter with his half-sister. 

Annabella Milbanke was socially conscious, interested in education for those who could not afford private tutors, designing and founding infants schools. She was also a supporter of prison reform and the abolition cause--she attended the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention, where she met Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She also met Harriet Beecher Stowe, who traveled to England in 1853, after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin--Stowe became a great admirer.

Even if you're not as naive as I was, and even if you think you might not be interested in reading about "Byron's wife," I encourage you to read Markus's biography. It's riveting--and a great insight into the status of women in the nineteenth century. (Despite physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, a woman had little recourse in the nineteenth century--and she had virtually no legal right to her child. Separating from Byron was an act of courage and determination, but it also took strong family support and expert legal representation.)

Annabella Milbanke, Lady Byron, was truly an accomplished and fascinating woman.

And might I recommend Julia Markus's website? You can find her at "Julia Markus writes." Or, more simply, by clicking here.

Mumbet Becomes Elizabeth Freeman

Elizabeth Freeman, formerly "Mumbet" (died 28 December 1829)

Elizabeth Freeman, "Mumbet"
miniature portrait by Susan Ridley Sedgwick,
c. 1812
(Susan Ridley married
Theodore Sedgwick Jr.)

Her date of birth was not recorded, nor was her date of purchase--but the enslaved "Mumbet," or Bett, and her younger sister, Lizzy, were the property of Pieter Hoogeboom, a Dutch merchant and landowner in Claverack, New York. According to the terms of his will: 

I bequeath to all my children . . . all my negroes and negresses, big and little, young and old, and all my horses and cattle and furthermore all my movable goods from the largest to the smallest that may be found after my death, to each his just tenth part. . . .  

Hoogeboom died in 1758, and as part of her "tenth," Annatie (anglicized as Hannah) and her husband John Ashley, living in Sheffield, Massachusetts, received Mumbet and Lizzy. (There is some dispute among historians as to whether Hannah and John Ashley received the girls as a sort of wedding gift or after Hoogeboom's death. I've linked you here to two representative accounts. The truth of the matter is that documentary evidence is scarce, but since we can read Hoogeboom's will, I've gone with that version, though the most frequently related account is that Mumbet was part of a wedding gift.) 

Life for Mumbet and her sister in the Ashley household was not easy. As her story is related by Catharine Maria Sedgwick in her "Slavery in New England" (published in a miscellany in London in 1853), Mumbet's "master" was a kind and gentle man, but his wife, Hannah, was a holy terror. 

According to Sedgwick's account, "soon after the close of the Revolutionary War," Mumbet "chanced" to hear a reading of the Declaration of Independence. The next day she went to the office of Theodore Sedgwick, a lawyer who had been a delegate to the Continental Congress and who had fought in the Continental army during the Revolutionary War. "Sir," she reportedly said to him, "I heard that paper read yesterday, that says, all men are created equal, and that every man has a right to freedom. I'm not a dumb critter; won't the law give me my freedom?" (Lawyer Sedgwick's daughter was the Catharine Maria Sedgwick who told Mumbet's story in "Slavery in New England.")

Sedgwick and his partner Tapping Reeve took the case of Mumbet and another of Ashley's slaves, Brom. The case of Brom and Bett v. Ashley was heard in August 1781 before Court of Common Pleas. The lawyers argued that slavery was illegal under the Massachusetts Constitution, newly ratified, which stated: "All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness."

The jury ruled in Mumbet and Brom's favor. The two were free. 

Taking the name Elizabeth Freeman, the newly freed Freeman went to work in the household of Sedgwick. Among her tasks, she cared for Catharine, who would later tell her story.

Mumbet's grave,
photo by Brady Barrows,
Mumbet.com

When she died in 1829, Elizabeth Freeman was buried in the Sedgwick family plot. The inscription on her gravestone was written by Charles Sedgwick, Theodore Sedgwick's son (and Catharine's brother):

ELIZABETH FREEMAN

known by the name of

MUMBET

Died Dec. 28, 1829

Her supposed age was 85 Years She was born a slave and remained a slave for nearly thirty years. She could neither read nor write, yet in her own sphere she had no superior nor equal. She neither wasted time nor property. She never violated a trust, nor failed to perform a duty. In every situation of domestic trial, she was the most efficient helper, and the tenderest friend. Good Mother, farewell.

There is a wealth of information available at the Mumbet website, including original court documents, but I love this opener:

Acknowledged by so few . . .

Elizabeth "Mumbet" Freeman is not mentioned in the publication Notable American Women (1971), a three volume biographical dictionary which is the first full-scale scholarly work of its kind. Mumbet is not mentioned in Merriam Webster's Biographical Dictionary. She is not mentioned in the National Women's Hall of Fame.

I've linked you above not only to this website but also to information at the Massachusetts Historical Society, which you can access by clicking here.

There are a couple of "biographies" available, but they all seem to be children's books.

Update: I had originally posted the photo of Mumbet's grave without giving credit to Brady Barrows, creator of mumbet.com, to which I have linked above. I offer my deepest apologies and have remedied the omission.

Update, 16 April 2026: The USPS has issued a sheet of stamps honoring "Figures of the American Revolution." Among the twenty-five portraits on the sheet is a stamp honoring Elizabeth Freeman.

Fanny Kemble: Actress, Abolitionist, Author

Frances Anne Kemble Butler (born 27 November 1809)

I am embarrassed to admit that, before embarking on this daybook project, I knew only that Fanny Kemble was a successful actress, born into a family of actors, and what little I knew about her as a nineteenth-century professional woman (and friend of the American novelist Henry James) was what led me to posting about her.

Fanny Kemble, 1830

But what I found out, once I began to investigate Kemble's life, was eye-opening--not that it wasn't there all along, but I was completely unaware of the totality of Kemble's career.

So, first, Fanny Kemble as an actress: she was the daughter of two actors, Charles Kemble and his wife, Marie Thérèse de Camp, who was herself born into an acting family (she was born in Vienna but began performing in English theatres in the late eighteenth century). The great Sarah Siddons (born Sarah Kemble) was Fanny's aunt, her father's younger sister; the actress Adelaide de Camp was also Fanny's aunt, her mother's sister. Fanny's younger sister, Adelaide Kemble, was an accomplished and well-known opera singer. 

Fanny Kemble made her stage debut at Covent Garden in 1829, and she gained success almost immediately, credited with having saved her family from economic ruin. She was particularly known for playing Shakespearean roles--Juliet (her debut role), Portia, and Beatrice among them. She made a successful tour of the United States with her father in 1832 and, later in her career, focused on a series of highly regarded (and financially successful) Shakespearean readings.

This much I knew. What I didn't know, however, proved revealing. At first I learned that Kemble was a writer--she wrote and published plays, poetry, memoirs, translations, and, in Notes on Some of Shakespeare's Plays, what we might regard as literary criticism, based on her years of experience with and reflections on the Shakespeare canon (the volume was published in 1882, when Kemble was in her seventies).

More significantly, however, Kemble married Pierce Mease Butler, an American, in 1834--at the time that they met in Philadelphia, Butler was the heir to one of the greatest of U.S. fortunes, including two plantations (a rice plantation on Butler Island, and a sea-island cotton plantation on St. Simon's Island). When he finally inherited his family properties in 1836, he also became one of the largest slaveholders in the United States. 

Kemble was later to write that she did not know the source of Butler's wealth when she married him--she was already a supporter of abolition. But in 1838, although he knew of his wife's views, Butler took her and their two daughters, Sarah and Frances, to live on the plantations in Georgia.

The couple clashed frequently over the morality of slavery and the conditions of the enslaved people on the Butler plantations. Kemble recorded her experiences in a diary--her views on the institution of slavery, her descriptions of the conditions of the slaves and of her encounters with them, her assessment of the other planters with whom the Butlers socialized. All of this she collected in a volume that she would later entitle Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation.

A year after leaving the plantations and returning to Philadelphia--where the Pennsylvania Abolition Society had been founded in 1775, where William Lloyd Garrison had begun publication of The Liberator in 1831, where the American Anti-Slavery Society had been established in 1833, and where Lucretia Mott, Angelina Grimké, and Sarah Grimké were all organizing against slavery--Fanny Kemble would write to a friend, "I have sometimes been haunted with the idea that it was an imperative duty, knowing what I know, and having seen what I have seen, to do all that lies in my power to show the dangers and the evils of this frightful institution."

Kemble might well have published her Journal as a number of abolitionists were encouraging her to do--except that her marriage to Pierce Butler had become irretrievably broken. Certainly their conflict over slavery was critical--but Butler was also unfaithful, he isolated her, he separated her from her children, and he threatened to sever all ties between her and her daughters if she published her memoirs about life at the Georgia plantations. 

By 1846, the two separated and, increasingly unhappy in the United States, Kemble returned to England where she resumed her role on the stage. But she soon returned to the United States: in 1848, she learned that Butler had sued her for divorce, claiming that Kemble had "willfully, maliciously, and without due cause, deserted him on September 11, 1845."

After a protracted--and expensive--legal battle, Butler was granted his divorce. By the terms of the decision, Butler retained legal custody of the children, though Kemble would have the right to see them for two months in the summers. The daughters were not allowed any other contact with their mother until after they reached the age of twenty-one.

Kemble remained in the United States, giving successful performances of her readings from Shakespeare. She still could not publish the Journal, fearful of the effects that any publication would have on Butler and on her contact with her children. But after the outbreak of the Civil War and concerned about public opinion in England, she finally published Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 in 1863.

Publication notice in Harper's Weekly

Its publication was explosive and divisive. As Catherine Clinton notes, 

Kemble's riveting account of her husband's slaves provides gripping insight on life in the antebellum South. As the wife of a planter, Kemble had unimpeded access to plantation affairs and was especially poignant and pointed when she allowed the voices of slave women, so seldom heard during this era, to shine through in the pages of her journal. 

Fanny and her daughter Sarah were reconciled once Sarah reached the age of twenty-one. Fanny's younger daughter Frances remained with her father and, bitter over her mother's Journal, later published her own memoir in 1883, Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation, intended to refute her mother's work. 

As for Butler--he lost his vast fortune in gambling and stock speculation. He was forced to liquidate his assets, including the sale all his slaves, by auction, on 3 March 1859. It was the largest single sale of human beings in U.S., known forever as "the weeping time."

Kemble continued performing in the United States, in Europe and in England--she died in London on 15 January 1893.

There are several noteworthy biographies, but instead of linking to them (they are easily found), I thought I'd link to two online essays that focus on Kemble's abolitionist views and her Journal: Catherine Clinton's essay is in the New Georgia Encyclopedia, which you can access online by clicking here; and the entry on Kemble at the African-American Registry, which you can access by clicking here.

You can buy various print-on-demand reprint editions of Kemble's Journal, but the book is also available through Project Gutenberg (click here) and at the Internet Archive you can read an online facsimile of the 1863 American edition, advertised above (click here).

Sojourner Truth: "I did not run off, for I thought that wicked, but I walked off, believing that to be all right"

Isabella Baumfree, who named herself Sojourner Truth (died 26 November 1883)

One of the most admired figures in nineteenth-century American history, Isabella Baumfree claimed her freedom when she escaped from slavery in 1826 and forged her identity by naming herself Sojourner Truth in 1843.

One of Truth's visiting cards

Born and enslaved in the north--New York--and not the south, as most people might assume, Truth is perhaps best known for the speech she delivered at the Women's Convention (Akron, Ohio) on 29 May 1851, now commonly titled "Ain't I a Woman?"

The first accounts of the speech were brief, printed within days of its delivery first by the the New York Tribune (6 June) and then by the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator.

Truth collaborated with abolitionist Marius R. Robinson to publish a full (recreated) text of the speech in the Anti-Slavery Bugle, the weekly publication of the Ohio American Anti-Slavery Society. That version includes this line: "I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?"

In none of these accounts is the familiar question "ain't I a woman?" mentioned. In fact, the repeated question did not appear at all until 1863, when Frances Dana Gage, who had chaired the 1851 convention, published her version of the speech in the National Slavery Standard. In addition to adding in the refrain, Gage also ventriloquized Truth's voice using the dialect of a Southern slave--Truth herself was born in New York, her first language was low Dutch, and she never lived in the south. (The dialect of the Truth speech became even more pronounced in Gage's republished versions of 1875, 1881, and 1889.) Gage's text was the version included in Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage's History of Woman Suffrage.

For better or worse, this is the version we seem to be stuck with. But Sojourner Truth's life is so much more than that one speech. After she escaped to freedom with her daughter in 1826, she sought to recover her son who had been sold by his New York owner to a slaveholder in Alabama--she won her court case.

The New York Tribune account of
Truth's 1851 speech

She became a Methodist minister, preached against slavery, became a supporter of women's rights, religious tolerance, and pacifism.

In addition to her speech at the Ohio convention, she published her memoirs, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, she bought a home, delivered many other notable speeches, and, after the Civil War, worked to provide land grants for former enslaved people. She also attempted to vote in the 1872 presidential election.

For a good overview of the issues involved in the Gage version of the "Ain't I a Woman?" speech, I recommend Kay Siebler's "Far from the Truth: Teaching the Politics of Sojourner Truth's 'Ain't I a Woman?'" (Pedagogy 10, no. 3 [2010]: 511-33)--if you have academic access, you can download a .pdf of this essay by clicking here. Otherwise, inter-library loan?

Lydia Maria Child, Social Reformer and Political Activist

Lydia Maria Francis Child (died 20 October 1880)

Born on 11 February 1802, Lydia Francis should be remembered today for much more than her "Over the River and Through the Woods" Thanksgiving poem.*

Lydia Maria Child, 1870

The daughter of David Convers Francis and Susannah Rand, Lydia Francis was educated at home in Medford, Massachusetts, then at a local "dame school"--a private school where girls received a primary-level education and "necessary" female skills like sewing and embroidery--and, then, at a women's seminary. (By contrast, her brother got a Harvard education.)

After her mother's death, Lydia was sent to live with a sister and trained to be a teacher. The years she spent with her sister in Maine also introduced her to an impoverished community of Abenaki and Penobscot Indians, awakening in her an awareness of the dire situation faced by Native American peoples. 

After a brief stint at teaching, she moved back to Massachusetts. At age nineteen, she renamed herself "Maria" (she didn't like the name Lydia) and began her real education with her brother, who introduced her to Homer and Milton and challenged her to write.

Her first novel, Hobomak: A Tale of Early Times, was completed in six weeks and published in 1824--set in Salem, it told the story of a young Puritan woman who scandalized her family and community by marrying an Indian, with whom she had a child. (Double scandal--the novel's heroine later married a second time, an Episcopalian!) The novel's themes, which challenged racial and religious views, ensured its success and Francis's celebrity. Lydia Maria Francis was just twenty-two.

In 1824 Maria Francis also opened a school and, two years later, began publication of a bi-monthly magazine for children, Juvenile Miscellany, the first periodical for children in the United States. She would continue to write and publish--novels, biographies, poetry, guides to housekeeping and child-rearing, and histories--throughout her lifetime. 

In 1828 she married David Lee Child, a man whose political and social activism corresponded with and extended her own. By 1831 she was involved with the abolition movement. Perhaps her most significant work was published in 1833, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, a history of slavery in the United States.

She joined the American Anti-Slavery Society, working alongside Lucretia Mott, and in 1840 became the editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. In her anti-slavery fiction, like the novel The Quadroons, published in 1842, ten years before Uncle Tom's Cabin, she exposed the realities of slavery to those who did not read anti-slavery pamphlets or anti-slavery periodicals. Child also edited Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, first published in 1861.

Nor did she forget her interest in the plight of the American Indians. She detailed white atrocities against native populations in The First Settlers of New-England: or, Conquest of the Pequods, Narragansets and Pokanokets: As Related by a Mother to Her Children, and Designed for the Instruction of Youth (1829) and, still working on the issue forty years later, An Appeal for the Indians (1868).

Her work in the abolition movement also involved her in the struggle for women's rights. Although she published a number of books for women that focused on domesticity (she published The Frugal Housewife the year after she married), she also wrote to support women's equality. 

In addition to publishing a series of biographies of notable women, her two-volume The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations was published in 1835, then revised and republished ten years later as Brief History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations. Her Letters from New York, also filling two volumes, included editorials on the topic of women's rights. As she argued, 

That the present position of women in society is the result of physical force is obvious enough; whosoever doubts it, let her reflect why she is afraid to go out in the evening without the protection of a man. What constitutes the danger of aggression? Superior physical strength, uncontrolled by the moral sentiments. If physical strength were in complete subjection to moral influence, there would be no need of outward protection. That animal instinct and brute force now govern the world, is painfully apparent in the condition of women everywhere. . . . 

This sort of politeness to women is what men call gallantry--an odious word to every sensible woman because she sees that it is merely the flimsy veil which foppery throws over sensuality to conceal its grossness. So far is it from indicating sincere esteem and affection for women, that the profligacy of a nation may, in general, be fairly measured by its gallantry. This taking away rights and condescending to grant privileges is an old trick of the physical force principle, and with the immense majority, who only look on the surface of things, this mask effectually disguises an ugliness which would otherwise be abhorred. The most inveterate slaveholders are probably those who take most pride in dressing their household servants handsomely and who would be most ashamed to have the name of being unnecessarily cruel. And profligates, who form the lowest and most sensual estimate of women, are the very ones to treat them with an excess of outward deference. . . .

Along with Lucretia Mott, she knew and worked with women we have met before, including Angelina Grimké and Margaret Fuller. 

Many of Child's works are available online through Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. There is a detailed biographical essay posted at The Poetry Foundation website--Deborah Clifford's biography is followed by an extended bibliography of primary sources and a great list of material for further reading, including biographies of Lydia Maria Child.

*Written for Thanksgiving and published in her 1844 collection of children's verse, Flowers for Children, the poem was set to music by an unknown composer and is now commonly regarded as a Christmas song.

Harriet Tubman, "Moses" for African American Slaves

Harriet Tubman, born Araminty Ross (escaped slavery 17 September 1849)

Although the date of her birth is unknown (she was born in Manchester County, Maryland, probably probably between 1820 and 1822), the woman whom we know today as Harriet Tubman lived a long life, dying on 10 March 1913, almost fifty years after the end of the Civil War.

Harriet Tubman, c. 1885

I am posting about Tubman today because on 17 September 1849 she escaped from slavery. 

The daughter of enslaved parents, Ben Ross and Harriet Green, Araminta (or "Minty") Ross, as she was known then, was born as the property of Mary Patisson Brodess. At the age of eleven, Araminta began calling herself "Harriet," after her mother. After Mary Patisson Brodess's death, her slaves became the property of her son, Edward Brodess. In 1844, Harriet Ross married a free black man, John Tubman.

But after Brodess's death, and fearful that his wife Eliza would sell off the slaves, Harriet Tubman escaped.

Although she would be returned after that first escape, Harriet Tubman eventually escaped again and arrived in Philadelphia. Her glorious story from that point--as an abolitionist; as a woman who returned to slave-holding territories to help other enslaved people to freedom; as a nurse, scout, and guide (and perhaps a spy) during the Civil War; and as a suffragist after the Civil War--has become iconic.

Her gravestone is on the National Register of Historic Places, she's had a U.S. postage stamp issued in her honor, and in 2013 Barack Obama signed a proclamation creating the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument. She has an asteroid named after her, and dozens of schools, and her very own Google Doodle. She's also included in the calendar of saints in both the Episcopal Church and Evangelical Lutheran Churches of America. 

An 1849 reward notice for "Minty," about
twenty-seven years old

But rather than summarizing her life or enumerating her accomplishments, I thought I might link you here to Ethan Kytle and Carl Geissert's excellent New York Times editorial, "Myth, Reality and the Underground Railroad." 

After the Civil War, of course, everyone claimed to have been involved with helping enslaved people to freedom on the Underground Railroad. But, as Kytle and Geissert note, "Most fugitive slaves gained their freedom largely through their own efforts."

And, as Kytle and Geissert also observe, "postwar accounts--nearly all of which were produced by white Northerners--tended to portray runaways as 'passengers' [on the Underground Railroad], effectively reducing them to a supporting role in their own liberation. Some authors inflated the number of fugitive slaves that they had helped, while others neglected the work of black railroad operatives. Over all, they painted a picture of the Underground Railroad as a white-dominated enterprise in which runaways were spirited to freedom by their Northern guardians."

"Even more troubling," they conclude, "many memorialists failed to connect their stories of the Underground Railroad to the postwar struggle for black civil rights": 

Instead, they served up what the historian David Blight describes as "a mythos of accomplished glory, a history of emancipation completed." Just as Lost Cause ideologues strove to conceal the rise of Jim Crow--from segregation and disenfranchisement to an epidemic of lynching--behind a facade of Old South harmony, Northerners told "self congratulatory adventure tales" that implied that the nation had solved its racial problems decades earlier. In this way, they joined their Southern counterparts in turning nostalgia for life before the war into a refuge from the disturbing realities of the postwar racial landscape.

So today might be a good day not only to remember Harriet Tubman--the real woman, not the fictionalized, glossy image of our imaginations--but to focus on what Blight has termed "race and reunion."

Harriet Tubman, photo from 1911

There are many biographies of Tubman (at least thirty aimed at juvenile readers, by my count)--I recommend Catherine Clinton's Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom.

I also suggest David Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.

On the larger question of the role of African-American activists in abolition and the end of slavery, Ira Berlin's The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States is essential. As New York Times reviewer Edward E. Baptist notes, "The Long Emancipation offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists."

Update (16 October 2016): As Kathryn Schulz notes in her recent New Yorker essay, "Derailed: The Troubling Allure of the Underground Railroad," there has been an "outpouring of interest" recently in the Underground Railroad--she counts two new novels, Carson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad: A Novel (an Oprah Bookclub selection!) and Ben Winters's counterfactual Underground Airlines, WGN America's television series Underground, as well as a forthcoming HBO biopic about Harriet Tubman, not to mention scholarly publications on the railroad and Tubman. But Schulz reminds us that, in many ways, the Underground Railroad remains "our favorite piece of mythic infrastructure." This is an excellent contextualizing essay--I did not know that, as Schulz clarifies, "most people who slipped the bonds of slavery did not look north." "In fact," she continues,

despite its popularity today, the Underground Railroad was perhaps the least popular way for slaves to seek their freedom. Instead, most who fled generally headed toward Spanish Florida, Mexico, the Caribbean, Native American communities in the Southeast, free-black neighborhoods in the upper South, or Maroon communities--clandestine societies of former slaves, some fifty of which existed in the South from 1672 until the end of the Civil War. Together, such runaways likely outnumbered those who, aided by Northern abolitionists, made their way to free states or to Canada.

Finally, she reminds us, most slaves did not run at all--some attempted to purchase their freedom and some sought legal judgments to end their freedom, but, "from the vast, vicious, legally permitted, fiercely defended enterprise that was American slavery, almost no one ever escaped at all."

For Schulz's essay, click here.

Sarah Moore Grimké: Abolitionist, Social Activist, Suffragist

Sarah Moore Grimké, American abolitionist (7 July 1878)

Earlier in the year, on 20 February, I posted an entry on the abolitionist Angelina Grimké, and in that essay, I included a fair amount about her older sister, Sarah Moore Grimké. The two were both social activists, working for the abolition of slavery and for women's rights. 

For once I haven't indicated the significance of the date in the heading to this post--it's complicated. This is certainly not the most obvious date for Grimké.

She was born on 26 November 1792 and died on 23 December 1873, so it's not that we don't know when she was born and when she died, basic information that is unknown for many of the women I've been writing about. 

There are other significant dates in her life as well--my original plan was to write about Grimké later this week, on 11 July, which was the date of the first of her letters "on the equality of the sexes." But if I did that, I wouldn't be able to write about Delarivier Manley on that day!

So here I am, with a roundabout date for Grimké: on 7 July 1878, almost five years after Sarah's death, her nephew, Francis J. Grimké, was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. Why is that so special? 

Francis J. Grimké was the son of Henry Grimké, Sarah and Angelina's brother. Henry was a wealthy planter in Charleston. But Francis was not the son of Henry and his wife, Selina Simmons, but of Henry and his slave, a woman named Nancy Weston.

Henry Grimké educated the three sons that Weston bore him and freed them in his 1852 will, placing the boys under the guardianship of their white half-brother, Montague. But Montague did not treat his half-siblings well, and in 1860, he threatened to sell Francis, then ten years old, into slavery. The boy ran away, and when he returned, Montague made good his threat. Francis was not free until the end of the Civil War.

Both Grimké sisters had left the South long before the death of their brother, unable to live with the horrors of slavery. Sarah had gone with her father to Philadelphia in 1819 so he could consult medical professionals there, and she had then gone with him to New Jersey. She had returned to Philadelphia after her father died in August of 1819 and then spent some time in Charleston before returning finally to Philadelphia. She went back to Charleston again in 1827, when she "rescued" her younger sister, Angelina. By 1829, both Grimké sisters were in Philadelphia, committed to the cause of fighting against slavery and for women.

It wasn't until after the Civil War, in 1868, that Sarah Grimké learned of her brother's three children by Nancy Weston. While reading an article in The Anti-Slavery Standard, Angelina Grimké noted that the writer referred to a young man named Archibald Grimké, "just out of slavery." After telling her sister Sarah about the coincidence, Angelina wrote to Archibald, wondering if there were a connection.

He responded, and for the first time the two Grimké sisters learned about Archibald, Francis, and John, her brother's children; she and Sarah publicly acknowledged the three boys as their nephews. With their connections and support, Francis was educated at the Lincoln University and then at Princeton Theological Seminary. He graduated and was ordained on 7 July 1878.

So 7 July is a roundabout date for this post, but it adds a critical element to the story of the Grimké sisters.

As for Sarah, more specifically, she published a series of letters on women's equality, written in 1837, each of the fifteen letters devoted to one particular aspect of women's situation, among them: "The Original Equality of Woman"; "Woman Subject Only To God"; "Social Intercourse of the Sexes"; "Women in Asia and Africa"; "On the Condition of Women in the United States"; "Heroism of Women--Women in Authority"; Intellect of Woman"; "Dress of Women"; "Legal Disabilities of Women"; "Relation of Husband and Wife"; "Ministry of Women"; and "Man Equally Guilty with Woman in the Fall,"

The letters were published in 1838 as Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman; you can read them online at various sites, but I'll link you to the first edition, available at Google Books.

And I love the way she signs off at the end of each letter: "Thine for the oppressed in the bonds of womanhood" and its variation, "Thine in the bonds of womanhood."

For an online biographical essay about Angelina and Sarah Grimké posted at the Women's Rights National Historical Park website, click here. (Did you even know there was a Women's Rights National Historical Park? I sure didn't!) For a biography and analysis, I suggest Gerda Lerner's The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition.

Update, 21 January 2023: Keri Greenidge's The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in America has appeared on a number of "notable books" lists for 2022. Described as a "stunning counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family." For more, here is Michael Jeffries's New York Times Review.

Update, 14 July 2026: Serious questions have been raised about Keri Greenidge's scholarship in her book on the Grimkés. On the issues and the repercussions, see Neil Vigdor's "A Decorated Researcher Comes under Fire," just published in the New York Times (click here).

Harriet Martineau: "A Great Lion in London"

Harriet Martineau (died 27 June 1876)

Born on June 12 1802, Harriet Martineau was the daughter of Thomas Martineau and Elizabeth Rankin. Martineau's father was a manufacturer of textiles (the "Norwich staples" of "bombazine and camlet") and an importer of wine, her mother the daughter of a wholesale grocer and sugar refiner, based in Newcastle. Nothing about this family background marked Harriet Martineau out for the remarkable career she would make for herself--except for her family's progressive views on education. 

Harriet Martineau, 1834,
portrait by Richard Evans

Harriet Martineau was provided with the same education as her brothers, at least until the brothers went off to continue their education at the university level.

In 1823, Martineau would publish "On Female Education" in the Unitarian journal Monthly Repository describing this essential injustice--an article her brother James, studying to become a minister, praised.

And once he learned his sister was the author, he encouraged her to do more than point out the injustice: "Now, dear, leave it to the other women to make skirts and darn stockings, and you devote yourself to this." 

Martineau did indeed devote herself to "this"--and to much more. Although tempted by a marriage her father arranged, she ultimately rejected a domestic life. She continued to write for the Monthly Repository on a number of subjects before relocating to London.

There she wrote devotional works before turning her attention to topics much less "suitable" for women--she wrote on politics and economics, publishing Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34), Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated (1833–34), and Illustrations of Taxation (1834). It was in 1834 that Charles Darwin, in Galapagos, received a letter from his sister noting that Martineau had become "a great Lion in London."

Martineau traveled to America in 1836 and published two works after that trip, Society in America (1837) and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838). In both she was highly critical of the way that the supposed democratic society operated. The chapter on women in Society in America--"Political Non-Existence of Women"--is particularly noteworthy: "One of the fundamental principles announced in the Declaration of Independence is, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. How can the political condition of women be reconciled with this?"

In America, Martineau met with a number of important American abolitionists, and in addition to the two books on her trip, her 1839 essay in the Westminster Review, "The Martyr Age in the United States," focused on the abolitionist movement in the United States.

In her long writing career, Martineau published novels, children's stories, histories, an autobiographical account of illness and invalidism (Life in the Sickroom: Essays by an Invalid), books on education (Household Education, 1848) and gardening, and on philosophy (Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, 1851), all the while continuing regular journalistic work (she contributed some 1600 articles just to the Daily News). She also traveled to the Middle East, publishing Eastern Life Past and Present (1848) and, a little closer to home, A Complete Guide to the English Lakes in 1855.

Although she suffered a number of disabilities and illnesses throughout her life, Martineau lived a relatively long and full life, dying in 1876 at the age of seventy-four.

Martineau is remembered today as a social activist and reformer, an economics and history writer, a journalist, and a feminist. In her now-classic anthology The Feminist Papers (1973), second-wave feminist and sociologist Alice S. Rossi had this to say about Harriet Martineau:

Crusty, garrulous, a prodigious writer, a forerunner of the discipline of sociology not yet born, Harriet Martineau stands as an early ardent defender of women's rights, the first woman sociologist, and a sympathetic observer of the social condition of women in a society that proclaimed freedom and justice for all but did not grant it to more than half its population.

You can read Martineau's "Political Non-Existence of Women" (in the first volume of Society in America) by clicking here. Another section, "Woman" (in the second volume of Society in America) is available here ("If a test of civilisation be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power. . . . Tried by this test, the American civilisation appears to be of a lower order than might have been expected . . . . ")

Society in America and many other works by Martineau are available through Google Books; many are also accessible at Project Gutenberg or through a free Kindle download. Martineau also wrote an autobiography, published posthumously, but you may enjoy Deborah Anna Logan's The Hour and the Woman: Harriet Martineau's "Somewhat Remarkable" Life.

Bonus trivia: according to Christopher Wilson's article in The Telegraph, "The Benefits of a Feminist in the Family," Kate Middleton is a descendant of Harriet Martineau: "Harriet Martineau's father was Kate's great, great, great, great, great grandfather." Why so backwards, Mr. Wilson? Instead of focusing on Martineau's father for this genealogical link, why couldn't you put it in these terms:  "Kate Middleton's great great great great great grandmother Elizabeth Rankin Martineau"?