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Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1999 13:37:29 -0400
From: H-Net Reviews <[log in to unmask]>
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Subject: Yee on Rhodes, _Mary Ann Shadd Cary_
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (July, 1999)
Jane Rhodes. _Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in
the Nineteenth Century_. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1998. xviii + 284 pp. Bibliography, illustrations, notes, and
index. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-253-33446-2; $18.95 (paper), ISBN
0-253-21350-9.
Reviewed for H-SHEAR by Shirley J. Yee <[log in to unmask]>,
Department of Women Studies, University of Washington
The Life and Times of Mary Ann Shadd Cary
Until recently, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black teacher, political
activist, journalist, and lawyer, has been one of the least studied
Black activists of the nineteenth century. Jane Rhodes's new book
on the life of one of the most vocal and controversial Black women
abolitionists is a much needed comprehensive biography that builds
upon and expands Jim Bearden's and Linda Jean Butler's _Shadd_,
published in the late 1970s. The significance of Rhodes's book is
that in addition to chronicling Shadd Cary's life, it provides an
important window into Black activist politics in the United States
and Canada during this period, the uneven development of the Black
press, the complicated internal struggles with Black abolitionist
leadership circles, the evolution of race relations in Canada, and
Shadd Cary's own personal struggles as an educated Black woman to
carve out a place for herself and her voice in the male-dominated
world of Black abolitionist and emigrationist discourse.
In the Fall of 1851, just before her twenty-eighth birthday, Mary
Ann Shadd joined the steady stream of Blacks escaped and freed
slaves as well as free-born Blacks who left the United States for
Canada during the 1850s. Having abolished slavery in 1833, Canada,
as part of the British empire, provided a legal refuge for escaped
slaves. Trained as a teacher, Shadd set out as a teacher of
fugitive slaves. Her passion for political writing, however,
quickly manifested, as evidenced by the publication of her
pro-Canadian pamphlet, _Notes on Canada West_ in 1852.
Rhodes begins the study by examining Shadd Cary's early life as a
free-born Black woman growing up in Wilmington, Delaware and West
Chester, Pennsylvania. This section of the book does more than
simply fill in the blacks of Shadd Cary's childhood. Rather, it
lays the foundation for a more complete understanding of the forces
that helped shape the life of this complex and controversial woman.
Shadd Cary's family clearly provided her with both material and
emotional resources as well as with an activist legacy. Born the
eldest of thirteen children to Abraham Doras Shadd, a prosperous
boot manufacturer, and Harriet Parnell Shadd, Mary Ann Shadd grew up
in relative economic comfort. Her father's regular participation in
local antislavery politics injected Shadd and her siblings with a
strong dose of abolitionist fervor. Abraham Shadd was a
well-respected member of the Black abolitionist leadership and
brought his children into frequent contact with many prominent
abolitionists, Black and white.
The larger community into which Shadd Cary grew up also shaped her
political views. As Rhodes aptly points out, Shadd Cary encountered
multiple layers of racism and sexism in the nonslaveholding northern
states in general and the northern free Black community in
particular. Within free Black urban society, which had internalized
racial hierarchies based upon skin color, Shadd, as a light-skinned
and economically privileged Black, was part of the northern free
Black elite who owned property and engaged in skilled trades. At
the same time, however, Shadd and her family, like other free
Blacks, lived in between slavery and freedom, residing within states
that sanctioned racial violence, discrimination, and segregation.
For example, despite the Shadds' wealth, obtaining a formal
education proved especially difficult in Delaware, where Blacks were
often excluded from schools. In Pennsylvania, despite a growing
anti-Black sentiment, her parents apparently paid for a private
education in Quaker schools, which were known for their antislavery
politics. It is likely that Shadd's exposure to institutional
racism influenced her later rejection of "complexional distinctions"
of any kind when she opened her school in Canada (p. 18). As a
Black female, Shadd often felt the sting of sexism, which limited
her choices in life, such as the pursuit of higher education,
economic independence within marriage, and entrance into
male-dominated professions. Like many unmarried, educated young
women of her generation, Shadd pursued teaching, one of the few
legitimate occupations open to women.
Rhodes's study is thorougly researched. The author mines available
written sources that enable her to weave together a cohesive
narrative of Shadd Cary's life and the world around her. In
addition to conducting painstaking research into the state census
reports, Rhodes makes careful use of _The Black Abolitionist
Papers_, a collection of writing by Black men and women in
connection to the antislavery movement. These papers have provided
historians of nineteenth-century African-American history with a
wealth of primary source material from Black newspapers, pamphlets,
and public and private correspondence.
Rhodes employs her expertise in U.S. journalism to analyze the
content of Shadd Cary's newspaper, _The Provincial Freeman_, as well
as other Black newspapers that served as a forum for Black political
views. From this analysis, readers learn a great deal about the
genealogy of the Black press in the United States and Canada, the
underlying, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, political agendas,
and, ultimately, the impact of Black newspapers on the reading
public of the time. As Rhodes illustrates, these publication
reflect the complex political dynamics that permeated the Black
abolitionist community over such issues as emigration, Black
nationalism, and strategies and tactics for combating slavery in
the United States. Such debates, as evidenced in the feud between
Shadd Cary and Henry Bibb, ex-slave and editor of the _Voice of the
Fugitive_, sometimes degenerated into personal attacks.
Throughout the book, Rhodes depicts both the public and private
aspects of Shadd Cary's life. The line between public and private
often blurred, for she lived a rather unconventional private life
for a woman of her generation and upbringing. Her marriage to
Thomas F. Cary, a businessman and activist from Toronto, was,
perhaps, the clearest marker of her defiance of gender conventions.
She lived apart from Cary for much of their four-year marriage in
order to operate and raise funds for her newspaper. The arrangement
seemed to work, for she apparently maintained a happy relationship
with her husband, who visited as often as he could. Yet, at his
death at age thirty-five, when she was pregnant with their second
child, Shadd Cary, like many widows, was left in a compromised
financial position.
The author argues effectively that despite Shadd Cary's efforts, she
could not escape the gender conventions that characterized
nineteenth century life. Although much is known about her
well-publicized confrontations with prominent Black abolitionist
men, less is known about her ongoing struggle to establish herself
as a journalist, a profession dominated by men. Rhodes uncovers
this dimension of Shadd Cary's professional life, which underscores
her continual struggles at the margins of Black leadership circles.
For years, she hid the fact that she was the true editor of the
_Freeman_. Samuel Ringgold Ward, a prominent New York minister and
editor of the _Impartial Citizen_, agreed to serve as the "editor."
A final important contribution of this book is its narrative of
Shadd Cary's experiences after she returned to the United States in
the 1860s. Previous studies of Shadd Cary provided only a cryptic
view of this portion of her life. Rhodes constructs a fuller
narrative of Shadd Cary's life between the 1860s and her death in
1893, including her efforts to earn a law degree, the continuation
of her teaching, and her participation in the temperance and woman
suffrage movements.
Rhodes's study of the life and times of Mary Ann Shadd Cary is a
valuable contribution to the historical scholarship in the U.S. and
Canadian history in general and Black history and women's history in
particular.
Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
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