Beyond Triage: Uplifting Black Women’s History in Education Through the Life of Maria W. Stewart

• In Event: They “Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: Black Women’s Contributions to Black Education

Abstract

How have Black women’s lives and work as intellectuals, educators, and institution builders shaped the history of Black education?
Scholarly discourse profiling prominent contributors to the history of Black education is often focused on analysis of Black male leaders. While the lives and work of Black male leaders, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, have been rightfully and carefully examined as significant cornerstones in the history of Black education, power imbalances in the production of historical narratives have often resulted in archival silences that obscure the lives and work of Black women leaders (Trouillot, 1995; Fuentes, 2016). When Black women are engaged for their contributions to the history of education, they are often done so through what Women’s Studies scholar Brittney Cooper refers to as acts of historical “triage,” in which scholars engage a recovery imperative, believing that once they’ve recovered a Black woman figure and documented key facts about her life and work, they can then “move on to the next patient,” rather than deeply and continually engaging her intellectual contributions (Cooper, 2017). This paper builds upon a body of research that seeks to deeply engage what Black women educators said and did, not just the fact that they existed (Taylor, 2006, McCluskey, 2014, Baumgartner, 2019).

In this paper, I seek to move beyond the practice of historical triage through a close analysis of the life, philosophies, and teaching career of Maria W. Stewart (1803-1879). Stewart, whose life has been recounted in only two full length books outside of her own published writings, is often remembered as the first black woman political writer and the first female orator of any race to speak before a mixed-race, mixed-gender audience (Cooper, 2011, Waters, 2021). She is memorialized as having a whirlwind but short-lived impact as a pioneering public intellectual from 1832 until 1833, when she exited the public circuit, likely due to attacks because of her race and gender (Bay, 2015). Through historical analysis of primary and secondary sources, including Stewart’s own writings, I recount the parts of Stewart’s life that are often forgotten: rarely discussed is her decision to leave the public circuit and become a teacher, working first in New York, becoming an assistant principal, and establishing multiple schools, including one in Baltimore in the 1850s, and two in Washington, D.C. in the 1860s (Stewart, 1987).

This paper answers the call to move beyond the practice of historical triage often assigned to the lives and philosophies of Black women, as well as the commonly accepted narrative of the life and career of the first Black woman public intellectual, emphasizing her role as a teacher and school builder. A vehement advocate for the education of the Black race and Black women in particular, Stewart’s life after exiting the public speaking circuit provides a unique vantage point into the overlooked, oversimplified, centuries-long legacy of Black women intellectuals, educators, and institution builders, and their roles in shaping the ideologies and practices that constitute Black education.

Author

• Zenzile Saharee Riddick, Northwestern University