to drive these young women out of the town. After seventeen months of continuous harassment, abuse, and even violence, white residents got their wish as the Canterbury Female Seminary closed in September 1834. This incident marked yet another unfortunate case of northern racist violence, but it was more than that too: it reveals a larger, more complex story of African American girls and women in pursuit of knowledge in nineteenth-century America.
The controversy surrounding the Canterbury Female Seminary galvanized African American women activists, who penned essays on the value of education, set their sights on building schools, and entered the teaching profession. Sarah Mapps Douglass, an African American teacher and school proprietor in Philadelphia, was certain that education opened a path to civil rights and economic betterment. In a public letter, she offered a powerful motto to guide African American girls and women: “Be courageous; put your trust in the God of the oppressed; and go forward!”1 In her estimation, educated and pious African American girls and women ought to live their lives with a sense of purpose.
In Pursuit of Knowledge examines the educational activism of Douglass and other African American women and girls living in the antebellum Northeast. “Activism” is broadly defined here to capture the forms of mobilization and resistance sometimes overlooked in histories that rely on more formal definitions. Few of the African American girls and women discussed in this book have been heralded as educational activists, and yet, as the following chapters will show, they engaged in concerted efforts to procure advanced schooling (beyond the primary level) and teaching opportunities for themselves and their communities.2 African American girls and women from working- and middle-class families used their resources and networks to establish schools that welcomed all students, regardless of race and class.3 These brave young women did not and could not simply go to school or teach; they had to engage in conscious, vigorous, and sustained acts of defiance and protest in their quest for an education. An African American mother trying to enroll her children in school was performing an act of protest (Figure I.1); an African American girl daring to rise to the top of her class affirmed that black intelligence was real and material; and an African American female teacher guiding African American children flouted exclusionary school laws. Rather than reading these acts of protest as disparate and singular, I read them as continuous and dynamic, becoming more and more organized and formal by midcentury.4
Students and teachers like Sarah Harris, Mary E. Miles, Serena deGrasse, Rosetta Morrison, Sarah Parker Remond, Susan Paul, Sarah Mapps Douglass, Charlotte Forten, and others were educational activists—each a pioneer and forerunner in her own way. Collectively they pushed for racial (and often gender) inclusion at a time when many white Americans considered the very idea of a multiracial democracy to be contrary to the good of the nation. Eschewing a strict division between public and private spheres, these African American women activists viewed the schoolhouse as both an extension of the home and a defining civic space.5 They framed their argument for educational inclusion as a matter of equality and rights—hence this book’s use of the phrase “equal school rights” to describe their efforts.
FIGURE I.1. “Colored scholars excluded from schools.” This illustration from the American Anti-Slavery Almanac (1839) depicts a man apparently barring an African American mother from leading her children into a schoolhouse. Author’s collection.
During the nineteenth century, schools became sites of production—to make Americans, to turn poor white boys into ministers, or to prepare white women for civic life. The historian Hilary Moss describes public schools of this period as “an Americanizing agent, an institution whose central purpose was to fuse children from all religions and ethnicities into a single American citizenry.”6 Yet African American children were routinely excluded from this nationalist pedagogical project because they were viewed as noncitizens. Similarly, proponents of women’s education endorsed female seminaries as places to train women to contribute to civil society but rarely felt the need to specify “only white women,” so implicit was the understanding that African American women would be excluded.7 The education of white men, women, and children thus flourished as schooling became increasingly bound up with social, political, and cultural obligations. African Americans, however, were considered unworthy of such responsibilities. A process of racialization was embedded within the very notions of childhood, womanhood, manhood, education, and citizenship.
Despite—and, perhaps even more intensely, because of—this exclusion, African American girls and women had educational ambitions that framed their very sense of womanhood. The historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar finds that many middle-class African American women in Philadelphia and New York City proved their respectability by their appearance, conduct, and education.8 Respectability signified moral excellence and contributed to a larger activist strategy to uplift the race.9 In fact, the scholar Linda Perkins argues that African American women were encouraged to become educated to promote this ideology of racial uplift.10 My book seeks to expand upon these narratives of respectability and racial uplift by tracing their specific meaning and impact in the nineteenth-century fight for equal school rights and by locating African American girls and women as actors in their own stories. I argue for a framework that puts African American girls and women at the center by viewing their actions collectively, not just individually, and by analyzing their ideas, words, and experiences as the valuable historical records they are.11
What emerges is the significance of another idea shaping African American women’s actions—not just the well-documented demand for respectability but also the related yet distinct call for purpose. Purpose held different meanings for different people; for some, it meant proselytizing, pursuing meaningful work, expanding the mind, and leading a respectable life. Both men and women used the term, as did whites and African Americans. In fact, some white women teachers in the antebellum era linked their Christian faith to a notion of usefulness.12 To the historian Thomas Woody, “social usefulness” rationalized white women’s education, particularly at female seminaries.13 But the racial and gender oppression under which African American women struggled gave purpose—and purposeful womanhood more specifically—a different meaning. African American women talked about leading a purposeful life not simply to rationalize their access to advanced schooling but to motivate more young women to value themselves and to do something of value in a world that failed to recognize them as valuable.
A purposeful woman was resilient, enterprising, and active—a proud seeker of knowledge. Though the ideology of purposeful womanhood came with some restrictions, it still offered a more capacious definition of domesticity, piety, and activism since it was specific to the experiences, actions, words, and thoughts of African American girls and women in a way that the ideology of the cult of domesticity, with its racial entanglements, never could be. Purposeful womanhood afforded African American girls and women the opportunity to study, to write, and to pursue knowledge—as activists, educators, community members, leaders, and, most of all, human beings.
African American women activists articulated this idea of the purposeful woman at literary societies, where members talked about being models to their families and communities; at female seminaries, where students learned to be resilient and to ignore racial abuse; and even on the lecture circuit, where lecturers stressed intellectual vitality. In a speech on women’s intellectual improvement, Elizabeth Jennings Sr., an African American homemaker, declared that women had a duty to “make ourselves useful,” to persevere in their quest for knowledge, and to engage in civic life.14 Hence embodying purposefulness was a way to resist white supremacy and to challenge racialized myths that denied African American girls and women virtue, will, and intellect. More important, it was a way to navigate and be in the world. Purposefulness was a proud articulation of self and community, an assertion of humanity, and a statement of African American girls’ and women’s raison d’être. African American girls and women worked to become what they wanted to be, despite the oppressive and hostile conditions of the antebellum North.
Any
