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Intellect, Liberty, Life: Women’S Activism And The Politics Of Black Education In Antebellum America

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dc.contributor.advisorManisha Sinha
dc.contributor.advisorJohn Bracey Jr
dc.contributor.advisorAmilcar Shabazz
dc.contributor.authorBaumgartner, Kabria
dc.contributor.departmentUniversity of Massachusetts - Amherst
dc.date2023-09-23T09:23:08.000
dc.date.accessioned2024-04-26T14:10:01Z
dc.date.available2014-06-13T00:00:00Z
dc.date.issued2011-09-01
dc.description.abstractDuring 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.
dc.description.degreeDoctor of Philosophy (PhD)
dc.description.departmentAfro-American Studies
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.7275/5685652
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/13289
dc.relation.urlhttps://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1309&context=dissertations_1&unstamped=1
dc.source.statuspublished
dc.subjectEducation
dc.subjectSocial sciences
dc.subjectBlack education
dc.subjectAntebellum
dc.subjectWomen activists
dc.subjectAfrican American history
dc.subjectHistory of education
dc.subjectU.S. women's history
dc.subjectAfrican American Studies
dc.subjectOther History
dc.subjectWomen's Studies
dc.titleIntellect, Liberty, Life: Women’S Activism And The Politics Of Black Education In Antebellum America
dc.typecampus
dc.typearticle
dc.typedissertation
digcom.contributor.authorBaumgartner, Kabria
digcom.date.embargo2014-06-13T00:00:00-07:00
digcom.identifierdissertations_1/310
digcom.identifier.contextkey5685652
digcom.identifier.submissionpathdissertations_1/310
dspace.entity.typePublication
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