Sarah Parker Remond

Born free in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1826 to a family of successful Black business owners and committed abolitionists, Sarah Parker Remond grew up alongside her brother Charles Lenox Remond, an established antislavery orator, and gave her own first anti-slavery lecture at age sixteen. In 1853, after she was forced out of a Boston theater's segregated seating, she pursued the matter and the theater was ordered to end the practice.

She became an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and in 1858 she traveled to Britain to build support for the abolitionist cause, lecturing widely, including an 1859 address in Warrington documented in first-wave feminist archives. While in London she studied at Bedford College, and later trained as a nurse at University College London. After gaining British citizenship in 1865, she moved to Florence, Italy, where she earned a medical degree and practiced as a physician for about two decades. She died in Rome in 1894.

Key contributions

• Delivered her first public anti-slavery lecture at age sixteen.
• Challenged theater segregation in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1853.
• Lectured across Britain from 1859 onward as an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, building international opposition to American slavery.
• Earned a medical degree in Florence, Italy, and practiced medicine there for roughly twenty years.

Context

Remond's British lecture tours were part of a broader effort by American abolitionists to pressure the U.K. — a major economic partner reliant on Southern cotton — into withholding support from the Confederacy. Her decision to remain abroad and build a second career in medicine reflects how much freer she found professional life outside the United States.

In their spirit: Take the argument wherever it needs to be heard, even if that means crossing an ocean.

About this set

Remond'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).

Note: sources disagree on Remond's birth year — most give 1826, though at least one source states 1815 and another 1824; this entry follows the more widely cited 1826 date. A dedicated National Park Service or Encyclopedia Britannica biographical page for Remond could not be located; her NPS citation here comes from an NPS article on the international history of the suffrage movement rather than a standalone biography.

Sources: National Park Service — The International History of the US Suffrage Movement.