Overlooked No More: Maria W. Stewart, Trailblazing Voice for Black Women

New York Times

01-03-2025

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
One day in 1831, Maria W. Stewart walked into the Boston offices of the publisher William Lloyd Garrison with a manuscript in hand that she was hoping he would print in his recently launched newspaper, The Liberator.
Garrison was a famous white abolitionist; Stewart was a 28-year-old former indentured servant. In her manuscript, a political manifesto, she recounted her upbringing and described the conditions for Black women in an oppressive America.
She also argued for equal opportunity for Black Americans, and she did something no Black woman had done before: speak directly and publicly to other women, urging them to educate themselves, 'to promote and patronize each other' and, even more, 'to sue for your rights and privileges.' As the historian Kristin Waters, the author of 'Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought' (2022), told Worcester State University in 2022, Stewart was 'one of the very first writers to express what we would now call 'feminism.''
Garrison didn't hesitate to publish Stewart's 'Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build,' as well as many more of her essays, in what would become America's pre-eminent abolitionist newspaper.
Maria Miller was born on Sept. 4, 1803, in Connecticut, in either Hartford or Greenwich. Little is known of her parents, Lib and Caesar, but scholars believe that they had both likely been enslaved in Greenwich, and that they had achieved a measure of freedom by the time Maria was born.
Maria (pronounced Mariah) was orphaned at age 5 and then, as she later recalled, 'bound out in a clergyman's family,' where she spent 10 years as a domestic servant. In her free time she studied books in the family's library, and she later attended Hartford's Sabbath schools. After her service ended, she moved to Boston, where she absorbed newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, sermons and speeches.
'My soul thirsted for knowledge,' she wrote, and this intense practice of self-education led her to become a writer. In an interview, Marilyn Richardson, who reintroduced Stewart's work in 1987 with the book 'Maria W. Stewart: America's First Black Woman Political Writer,' called her 'an autodidact of just stunning dimensions.'
In the first essay she wrote, Stewart posited that white Americans 'have practiced headwork these 200 years, and we have done their drudgery.'
'How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?' she asked. Her answer: Pool community resources and build a high school so 'the higher branches of knowledge might be enjoyed by us.'
She reminded readers that the Constitution 'hath made all men free and equal,' and she envisioned a world that went well beyond ending slavery, in which Black Americans could be business owners, educators and full participants in the nation's economy and civic institutions.
Stewart began a second career as a public speaker and attracted paying audiences that were racially mixed and included both men and women. She used her platform to address domestic and global political issues: She denounced abolitionists who favored a gradual end to slavery and called out the hypocrisy of America's leaders for supporting Europe's independence revolutions while refusing to acknowledge the singular uprising in Haiti that in 1804 established a republic under Black self-rule.
But she could be caustic, criticizing even her fellow Black Americans for failing to work hard enough. She remonstrated Black men for 'gambling and dancing' instead of becoming what she called 'men of eminence': statesmen, scientists, lawyers, philosophers. 'If you are men,' she goaded them, then convince white Americans 'that you possess the spirit of men.' Many in Stewart's audiences responded harshly, even her own circle of Boston friends, but Stewart continued to write and speak her mind.
In 1826, she married James W. Stewart, a naval veteran of the War of 1812 who became a successful shipping agent in Boston, investing in whaling ventures and fitting out sailors and fishing vessels. They lived in the racially diverse North Slope of Beacon Hill, just steps away from the African Meeting House, which functioned as a community space, school and church. They had no children, and James Stewart died of heart failure in 1829.
In the wake of this painful loss — along with an extended legal battle over James's estate, in which a white businessman forged the will, fraudulently naming himself executor and leaving her penniless — Stewart underwent a religious conversion. 'I made a public profession of my faith in Christ,' she wrote, and as Kristin Waters noted in her biography, she opened her mind 'to deep political truths.' Stewart's writings became heavily influenced by the Bible, and she further broke boundaries as a woman in a fundamentally patriarchal society by daring to commandeer the voice of its most foundational text to argue her case.
In 1833, Stewart moved to New York and began a third career: as a teacher. She worked in the public schools, eventually rising to assistant principal of Colored School No. 3 in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.
Though she had never received a formal education, she taught reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, geography and grammar. In 1835 she arranged for the publication of her speeches, essays and religious meditations as 'Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart'; it had an immediate influence. Within a year, according to the historian Marilyn Richardson, other women, Black and white, ascended the podiums of churches and meeting halls across the country to proclaim a 'social gospel of liberation and justice for all.'
In the early 1860s Stewart moved to Washington, where she opened her own school. It attracted prominent members of the Black community who paid tuition; she also welcomed those who couldn't afford it free of charge. In her last job she worked as a matron at the Freedmen's Hospital (now Howard University Hospital), which provided aid to formerly enslaved people and their families.
Toward the end of her life, Stewart learned that the government was offering pensions to veterans of the War of 1812, and applied as a veteran's widow. She used the income to underwrite a new, greatly expanded collection of her speeches and writings, 'Meditations From the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart,' which guaranteed that her voice and ideas would be preserved for future generations.
She died at Freedmen's Hospital in December 1879. She was 76.
Maria W. Stewart had a profound influence on later activists. Richardson, the historian, observed that her command of sophisticated oratory techniques such as call-and-response, anaphora, parataxis and the use of powerful and affecting rhythms proved she was 'a clear forerunner' to Sojourner Truth, Frances E.W. Harper, Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet and many others. And Waters, her biographer, credits Stewart with laying the groundwork for today's conversations around intersectionality with her pioneering writings on race, gender and class.
In 2024, after the Boston State Senate announced that it would honor a woman with a bust in its chamber, the journalist Kimberly Atkins-Stohr published an opinion piece in The Boston Globe arguing that it should be of Stewart. In an interview, Stohr said she draws strength from Stewart's determination whenever she encounters vitriol in her inbox or on social media, following the example of America's first Black woman political writer: 'If Stewart had the ability to find it within herself to do that work, then I can, too.'