Maria W. Stewart

Born Maria Miller in 1803 in Hartford, Connecticut, to free Black parents, Stewart was orphaned by age five and spent the next decade bound as an indentured servant in a clergyman's household. She married shipping agent James W. Stewart in 1826, but he died just three years later, and the white executors of his will defrauded her of her inheritance, forcing her back into domestic work.

Around this time she also lost her mentor, the abolitionist David Walker, and underwent a religious conversion that convinced her she was called to speak out against slavery. In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison published her essay “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality” in his newspaper The Liberator. Her 1832 address at Boston's Franklin Hall is considered one of the first recorded public speeches by any American woman, delivered at a time when women, and especially Black women, addressing “mixed” audiences of men and women was considered radical. Her calls for Black resistance to slavery and oppression directly influenced Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. After retiring from public lecturing in 1833, Stewart continued teaching and later served as head matron of Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, D.C., until her death in 1879.

Key contributions

• One of the first American women of any race recorded speaking publicly on abolition, beginning around 1832.
• First Black American woman known to write and publish a political manifesto.
• Published essays in The Liberator starting in 1831.
• Later served as head matron of Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Context

Stewart spoke at a moment when religious and social norms barred women from public speaking altogether, particularly before audiences that included men — a barrier she crossed years before Sojourner Truth's more widely remembered speeches. Her short public lecturing career (it lasted roughly a year) reflects how much backlash even a single Black woman's voice could draw at the podium in 1830s Boston.

In their spirit: Speak first, even when no one has cleared the stage for you yet.

About this set

Stewart's card is one of six in Set 1B — Freedom's First Draft, part of the Lineage: Origin Fire digital postcard collection. Freedom's First Draft gathers women who wrote, testified, and organized the first records of their own freedom.

Shop the Freedom's First Draft set or get the Complete Collection (all 12 cards).

Sources: National Park Service — Maria W. Stewart biography; Encyclopedia Britannica — Maria Stewart.