WOMEN IN THE FIRST HALF OF 1800; MARY ANN SHADD CARY P/24

 

In this story I will focus on a woman named Mary Ann Shadd Cary. She was born in 1823 in the free state of Delaware, where her abolitionist parents Abraham D. Shadd and Harriet Parnell Shadd ran their home as a station on the Underground Railroad. Delaware did not allow Black children to be educated, so when Mary Ann was ten years old, the family moved to Pennsylvania and sent their children to a Quaker boarding school. This upbringing undoubtedly impacted Mary Ann, who was seen as a rebel even in her own family of activists.

Mary Ann set up a school for Black children in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and continued to teach throughout the northeastern United States until she moved to Canada in 1851.

When Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the largest wave of Black migration to Canada in the 19th century was set in motion. Feeling that refugees would need her services, Mary Ann and her brother Isaac migrated to Canada and the rest of her family soon followed.