Secondary Source
Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century
Jane Rhodes. "Mary Ann Shadd Cary The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century." Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1999.
Era: Post-Suffrage Era | Media: Book-Non-Fiction
The book Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century tells the story of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, one of the most overlooked black abolitionists and suffragists.
The publisher of the award-winning book by scholar Jane Rhodes offers this summary:
Mary Ann Shadd Cary was a courageous and outspoken 19th-century African American who used the press and public speaking to fight slavery and oppression in the United States and Canada. Her life provides a window on the free black experience, emergent black nationalisms, African Americans’ gender ideologies, and the formation of a black public sphere.
A New York Times obituary, published as part of a series on people whose deaths did not receive attention when they died, gives further context to who Cary was:
Shadd Cary was the first black woman in North America to edit and publish a newspaper, one of the first black female lawyers in the United States and an advocate for granting women the right to vote.
The website Women Suffrage and Beyond published this summary of Cary’s suffrage work:
After the [Civil War] she moved to Washington, DC, to teach and to attend law classes at Howard University where she became the first woman to receive this degree (1883). Like many other pioneers, she intended her legal training to demonstrate women’s capacity and to use it in the struggle for female emancipation. To the same end, she joined the National Woman Suffrage Association, speaking at its 1878 convention, and worked with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. While her efforts in the last decades of her life focused on the U.S., she continued to support Canadian reformers, assisting in a suffrage rally in 1881.
You can buy the book Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century here.