In Pursuit of Knowledge
Описание книги
Winner, 2020 Mary Kelley Book Prize, given by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Winner, 2020 Outstanding Book Award, given by the History of Education Society Uncovers the hidden role of girls and women in the desegregation of American education The story of school desegregation in the United States often begins in the mid-twentieth-century South. Drawing on archival sources and genealogical records, Kabria Baumgartner uncovers the story’s origins in the nineteenth-century Northeast and identifies a previously overlooked group of activists: African American girls and women.In their quest for education, African American girls and women faced numerous obstacles—from threats and harassment to violence. For them, education was a daring undertaking that put them in harm’s way. Yet bold and brave young women such as Sarah Harris, Sarah Parker Remond, Rosetta Morrison, Susan Paul, and Sarah Mapps Douglass persisted. In Pursuit of Knowledge argues that African American girls and women strategized, organized, wrote, and protested for equal school rights—not just for themselves, but for all. Their activism gave rise to a new vision of womanhood: the purposeful woman, who was learned, active, resilient, and forward-thinking. Moreover, these young women set in motion equal-school-rights victories at the local and state level, and laid the groundwork for further action to democratize schools in twentieth-century America. In this thought-provoking book, Baumgartner demonstrates that the confluence of race and gender has shaped the long history of school desegregation in the United States right up to the present.
Оглавление
Kabria Baumgartner. In Pursuit of Knowledge
IN PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE. Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America
CONTENTS
FIGURES
Introduction: Purposeful Womanhood
1 / Prayer and Protest at the Canterbury Female Seminary
2 / Race and Reform at the Young Ladies’ Domestic Seminary
3 / Women Teachers in New York City
4 / Race, Gender, and the American High School
5 / Black Girlhood and Equal School Rights
6 / Character Education and the Antebellum Classroom
Conclusion: Going Forward
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Appendix A: List of Black Students at the Canterbury Female Seminary in Connecticut
Appendix B: List of Black Students at the Young Ladies’ Domestic Seminary in New York
Appendix C: List of Black Families in the Northeast. The Morrison Family of Hartford, CT, and New York City
The deGrasse Family of New York City
The Turpin Family of New York
The Remond Family of Salem, MA
The Paul Family of Boston, MA
The Riley Family of Boston, MA
The Roberts Family of Boston, MA
The Lyons Family of New York and Providence, RI5
The Forten Family of Philadelphia
Appendix D: Physical Attacks on Black Schools in the Northeast, 1830–1845
NOTES. Notes to Introduction
Notes to Chapter 1
Notes to Chapter 2
Notes to Chapter 3
Notes to Chapter 4
Notes to Chapter 5
Notes to Chapter 6
Conclusion
Appendix C
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Отрывок из книги
Early American Places is a collaborative project of the University of Georgia Press, New York University Press, Northern Illinois University Press, and the University of Nebraska Press. The series is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.earlyamericanplaces.org.
ADVISORY BOARD
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By allying herself with her African American female scholars, Prudence forced, albeit briefly, a conversation about the virulence of racial prejudice in the North. She described white racism as “inveterate” and “the strongest, if not the only chain that bound those heavy burdens on the wretched slaves,” thus linking slavery and racial prejudice. This injustice motivated her to establish the Canterbury Female Seminary, whose mission was to “fit and prepare teachers for the people of color.”76 Preparing women for the teaching profession at female seminaries was hardly a new endeavor, though it had, until then, been one mostly reserved for white women. For instance, Ipswich Female Academy, founded in 1828 and run by Zilpah Grant, graduated twenty-seven female students between 1829 and 1830, all but two of whom immediately became teachers.77 Prudence’s words and actions thus forced her opponents to confront their prejudices. One editorialist confessed, “Will it be said that this is prejudice?—Be it so.”78
Prudence also faced sexist attacks, further demonstrating that white opposition was intimately tied to constructions of manhood and womanhood. Opponents smeared her, painting her as a crook who transformed her school only to make money, and as a champion of racial mixing. One editorialist from the United States Telegraph suggested that getting the “young lady [Prudence] a husband” would surely lure her away from her experiment—implying that Prudence suffered from her lack of a husband and was not genuinely committed to educating African American women.79 Judson went even further, accusing her of “step[ping] out of the hallowed precincts of female propriety” by betraying her original mandate and refusing men’s demands to return to it. Prudence’s opponents sought to reset the racial and gender order she had upset, restoring white women to their subordinate status to white men (and African American women excluded altogether).80
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