Notable Enslaved African American Women
- Lucy Terry (c. 1730–1821) is the author of the oldest known work of literature by an African American.
- Phillis Wheatley (May 8, 1753 – December 5, 1784) was the first African-American poet and first African-American woman to publish a book.
- Margaret Garner (called Peggy) was an enslaved African American woman in pre-Civil War America who was notorious - or celebrated - for killing her own daughter rather than allowing the child to be returned to slavery.
- Sojourner Truth (c. 1797 – November 26, 1883) was the self-given name, from 1843 onward, of Isabella Baumfree, an African American abolitionist and women's rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man. Her best-known extemporaneous speech on gender inequalities, "Ain't I a Woman?", was delivered in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. During the Civil War, Truth helped recruit black troops for the Union Army; after the war, she tried unsuccessfully to secure land grants from the federal government for former slaves.
- Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Harriet Ross; 1820 – March 10, 1913) was an African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and Union spy during the American Civil War. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made more than thirteen missions to rescue more than 70 slaves using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. She later helped John Brown recruit men for his raid on Harpers Ferry, and in the post-war era struggled for women's suffrage.
- Ellen Craft (1826–1897) was a slave from Macon, Georgia who posed as a white male planter to escape from slavery. She escaped to the North on December 1848 by traveling openly by train and steamboat, arriving in Philadelphia on Christmas Day.
Read more about this topic: Female Slavery
Famous quotes containing the words notable, enslaved, african, american and/or women:
“Every notable advance in technique or organization has to be paid for, and in most cases the debit is more or less equivalent to the credit. Except of course when it’s more than equivalent, as it has been with universal education, for example, or wireless, or these damned aeroplanes. In which case, of course, your progress is a step backwards and downwards.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Trust me that as I ignore all law to help the slave, so will I ignore it all to protect an enslaved woman.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“I never feel so conscious of my race as I do when I stand before a class of twenty-five young men and women eager to learn about what it is to be black in America.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American college professor. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B3 (July 27, 1994)
“We work harder than ever, and I cannot see the advantages in cooperative living.”
—Lydia Arnold, U.S. commune supervisor (of the North American Phalanx, Red Bank, New Jersey, 1843- 1855)
“Elyot: It doesn’t suit women to be promiscuous.
Amanda: It doesn’t suit men for women to be promiscuous.”
—Noël Coward (1899–1973)