WOMEN IN THE FIRST HALF OF 1800; MARY ANN SHADD CARY P/26

 

In this blog I will continue the story of a woman named Mary Ann Shadd Cary. She lived from 1823 - 1893. Mary Ann's husband, Thomas Cary, died in 1860, leaving her a widow with two children. She continued to struggle financially until her friend and fellow abolitionist Martin Robinson Delany offered her a job as a Recruiting Officer for Black men in the Union Army, making Mary Ann the first Black woman to actively recruit troops. After the Civil War, she remained in Washington D.C.

Mary Ann taught and attended classes at Howard University School of Law, where she was Howard's first Black female law student and one of the first Black women to earn a law degree. Mary Ann then joined the women's suffragette movement. 

To say that Mary Ann was ahead of her time would be an understatement: While Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the 19th amendment on the grounds that it gave Black men the vote before white women, Mary Ann both spoke in support of the amendment and criticised it for not giving women to right to vote. Furthermore, when even abolitionists were wary of integrated education, Mary Ann opened and taught at a racially integrated school.