Maria W. Stewart

Maria Miller was born free in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1803. She was orphaned at five and bound out as a servant in the household of a Hartford clergyman, where she received the religious instruction that shaped her subsequent rhetorical voice. She married James W. Stewart, a free Black shipping agent in Boston, in 1826; she was widowed in 1829 at twenty-six.

In 1831 she became the first known American-born woman of any race to deliver public political lectures before a mixed-gender public audience. Her four major lectures — delivered between September 1832 and September 1833 at the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill and the Franklin Hall — predated by approximately six years the better-known public addresses of Sarah and Angelina Grimké and by approximately eighteen years the public political career of Sojourner Truth (also placed in this archive).

Her lectures argued — on explicit biblical authority — for the abolition of slavery, the rights of free Black Americans to education and the franchise, and the political and intellectual capacity of Black women. Her 1833 address Lecture Delivered at the Franklin Hall Boston challenged Black men in the audience directly on their failure to educate their daughters and to make political room for the women of the free Black community.

She left Boston in 1833 after public hostility — including from elements of the free-Black male community who objected to the public role of a Black woman — made continued lecturing impossible. She lived in New York and Baltimore as a teacher across the next four decades, was widowed twice, and ultimately settled in Washington, D.C., where she founded the Freedmen's Hospital Sunday School in 1871 and worked as a matron at the hospital until her death.

She died in Washington on the seventeenth of December 1879, age seventy-six.

She is honored here as the first American woman of any race to deliver public political lectures to a mixed-gender public.