Overlooked No More: Maria W. Stewart, Trailblazing Voice for Black Women

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

One day in 1831, Maria W. Stewart walked into the Boston offices of the publisher William Lloyd Garrison with a manuscript in hand that she was hoping he would print in his recently launched newspaper, The Liberator.

Garrison was a famous white abolitionist; Stewart was a 28-year-old former indentured servant. In her manuscript, a political manifesto, she recounted her upbringing and described the conditions for Black women in an oppressive America.

She also argued for equal opportunity for Black Americans, and she did something no Black woman had done before: speak directly and publicly to other women, urging them to educate themselves, “to promote and patronize each other” and, even more, “to sue for your rights and privileges.” As the historian Kristin Waters, the author of “Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought” (2022), told Worcester State University in 2022, Stewart was “one of the very first writers to express what we would now call ‘feminism.’”

Garrison didn’t hesitate to publish Stewart’s “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build,” as well as many more of her essays, in what would become America’s pre-eminent abolitionist newspaper.