In the spring of 1832, a free, young African American woman, Maria W. Miller Stewart, rose to address a Boston audience. During the next three years, Stewart made a total of four public addresses, published a political pamphlet and a collection of meditations, and then retired deliberately from the public stage, seemingly defeated by the obstacles arrayed against her as both an African American and a female speaker.[1] Some critics give Stewart credit as the first American-born woman to deliver a public address before what was then called a "promiscuous" audience, one composed of both men and women.[2] It is more likely that Deborah Sampson Gannett, who disguised herself as a male soldier to serve in the American Revolution and subsequently …show more content…
Despite the existence of female preachers and missionaries in the early part of the nineteenth century,[10] political speech was still deemed the exclusive domain of men. Yet Maria W. Miller Stewart poses a mystery for rhetorical critics even today. Why is this true pioneer so often overlooked in studies of African American and women’s oratory? When her speeches are acknowledged in collections of rhetoric, why are they designated as religious rather than political--making Stewart, as Lora Romero puts it, "the stepchild of Teresa of Avila (as opposed to the sister of Nat Turner)"?[11] Although a talented wielder of religious allusion and argument, Stewart’s message was both political and militant. For Stewart, "militancy" did not mean violence but the adoption of a more activist stance, one that challenged the passive acceptance of discrimination. Later militant reform movements would utilize dramatic demonstrations and civil disobedience to publicize the need for reform and force legislative action. Maria W. Stewart, through rhetorical devices alone, accomplished this same publication of the grievances suffered by free African Americans. By her very presence on the speaker's platform, Stewart challenged the boundaries set for women and free African Americans and enacted a new