LITMIR.BIZ

      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 pretense that the antebellum North shone like a beacon of liberty for free blacks has been shattered by historians writing about northern black activism.15 In particular, the Northeast, which includes six New England states plus New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, counted a little over 122,000 free blacks in 1830. By then, slavery was all but extinct in the region, but white supremacy thrived nationwide, leaving free blacks in a precarious position, to say the least. If not by law, then by custom, African American women, men, and children experienced disenfranchisement, racial discrimination in public accommodations, and economic insecurity. Facing this reality, free blacks established their own institutions, formed activist networks, and participated in reform movements from temperance and abolition to education.

      The subject of African American women’s education in the United States often focuses on a single institution, Oberlin College, which adopted a policy to admit students, regardless of sex and race, in 1835. That same year James Bradley became the first African American man to attend Oberlin, and a year later Elizabeth Latta was probably the first African American woman to do so. Oberlin was indeed an important educational destination, so much so that some African American families moved to the area. For instance, Blanche V. Harris received her early education at public schools in Monroe, Michigan, before her family relocated to the town of Oberlin so that she and her siblings could attend the college.16 This college, as the historian Carol Lasser rightfully points out, was the “only institution of higher education in the [antebellum] United States to offer collegiate-level training to African American women.”17

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