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Anderson, Katrina

History

2009

MA

This thesis focuses on the activism of African American women in Boston and Philadelphia between the years 1830 and 1860. Seeking to end slavery and discrimination against African Americans, free black women assumed a more prominent role in the public sphere to achieve their goals. In their activism these women renegotiated nineteenth- century gender roles within free African American community to end slavery. This project will explore how free black women promoted racial uplift for African American communities as a justification for their increasingly public roles in society. Moreover, this thesis seeks to determine whether writings and activism by these women served as a catalyst for free African American women to construct new definitions of black womanhood.
In this thesis, I seek to illuminate the ways in which free African American women such as Sarah Mapps Douglas, Maria Stewart, and Sarah Parker Remond adhered to or challenged gender roles in their fight to abolish slavery. I will analyze whether these women used religion, racial uplift, or domesticity as a justification for their increasingly public roles in society and if these strategies were accepted by the free African American community and the American community. I hope to determine if their roles as activists caused free African American women to reevaluate their own roles in society and to create new definitions of "acceptable" behavior for them.