Off-campus UMass Amherst users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your UMass Amherst user name and password.
Non-UMass Amherst users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Dissertations that have an embargo placed on them will not be available to anyone until the embargo expires.
Intellect, Liberty, Life: Women’S Activism And The Politics Of Black Education In Antebellum America
Date of Award
9-2011
Access Type
Campus Access
Document type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Afro-American Studies
First Advisor
Manisha Sinha
Second Advisor
John Bracey Jr
Third Advisor
Amilcar Shabazz
Subject Categories
African American Studies | Other History | Women's Studies
Abstract
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, academies and seminaries sprang up throughout America, but these institutions excluded African Americans. Around the same time, mobs began destroying schools for African Americans in various cities and towns in the free states and territories. Aware of this struggle over black education, quite a few African American and white women began to mobilize. This dissertation asks why African American and white women joined the struggle for black education and what they thought, said, and did to advance black education at a time of heightened racial hostility in the antebellum North. Drawing on historical methods and feminist theory, this dissertation shows that women were in the vanguard of black education during the antebellum era.
Some of the women studied in this dissertation are Maria Stewart, Sarah Mapps Douglass, Prudence Crandall, Hannah Barker, Laura Haviland, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Mary Miles Bibb, and Harriet Jacobs. These women educators pursued a range of initiatives, including building primary and secondary schools, establishing voluntary associations, organizing and fundraising, joining the teaching profession, and writing education-themed narratives, to secure educational opportunities for African Americans. Regardless of the particular vehicle for their educational work, some African American and white women educators organized and campaigned to promote equity in American education and to assert the changing status of African Americans in the nation.
This study also situates women's activism within the broader movement to abolish slavery, which allows for an analysis of the various discourses on African American education that circulated in the antebellum era. Following the lead of African Americans, women antislavery activists argued that education could help to overthrow the institution of slavery. Hence some women worked to build and strengthen alliances across race, gender, and class lines in order to realize a more inclusive and democratic nation. By examining women's activism in the struggle for black education, this dissertation renders a dynamic representation of African American and white women as agents and thinkers in the fight against caste, oppression, and slavery.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/5685652
Recommended Citation
Baumgartner, Kabria, "Intellect, Liberty, Life: Women’S Activism And The Politics Of Black Education In Antebellum America" (2011). Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014. 310.
https://doi.org/10.7275/5685652
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/310