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Women’s History Month
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| Courtesy Photo |
Harriet Jacobs, who was born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813, was orphaned while still a young child. She was taught to read by her owner’s wife and, by her own account, experienced a relatively pleasant childhood. In 1835, after a long history of sexual harassment and abuse under different owners, Jacobs ran away and spent several years living in a small crawlspace above a storeroom in her grandmother’s home. Seven years later, Jacobs finally escaped to the North.
She became active in the antislavery movement and, at the urging of several female abolitionists, wrote “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” which was published in Boston in 1860. “Incidents” is a powerful depiction of certain aspects of slavery, such as the sexual abuse of female slaves, avoided by most nineteenth-century critics of the institution. When the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, Jacobs wrote “I have lived to hear the Proclamation of Freedom for my suffering people. All my wrongs are forgiven. I am more than repaid for all I have endured.”
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| Courtesy Photo |
Laura Matilda Towne was an American educator and abolitionist. From Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Towne studied homeopathic medicine privately and attended the Penn Medical University. She taught in charity schools in various northern towns and cities in the 1850s and '60s. In 1862 she answered an appeal for volunteers to teach, nurse, and otherwise help former slaves who had been freed in the Union capture of Port Royal and other Sea Islands area of South Carolina. Soon Towne was teaching school, practicing medicine, and helping to direct the distribution of clothing and other goods in the areas Blacks. In September 1862 Towne established the Penn School, one of the earliest freedmen's schools. Through her, Penn had a detailed curriculum patterned on the (then) tradition of New England system. By 1867 she had devoted herself entirely to the school, which remained for decades the only secondary school available to the Black population of the Sea Islands. She conducted the school until her death at Frogmore, her restored plantation on St. Helena Island, on Feb. 22, 1901. The school was renamed the Penn Normal, Industrial, and Agricultural School a short time later.
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| Courtesy Photo |
Henriette Delille, born in 1813, was a Creole abolitionist and religious leader. She was the offspring of one of the oldest families of free people of color in New Orleans. The daughter of Jean Baptiste Delille-Sarpy and Pouponne Dias, her mother was a quadroon and the mistress of her father, who was an aristocrat. Her great great-grandmother, Nanette, was a slave.
In 1824 Delille was introduced to a French nun named Sister St. Marthe Fontier, the first member of a religious community that Delille had met. She was impressed by the Sisters dedication to God and her vows and acts of charity. In 1836, along with several other women, Delille established the Sisters of the Presentation, which later became the “Sisters of the Holy Family,” the second oldest Catholic religious order for women of color. She purchased land on Barracks Street with the assistance of the free people of color in New Orleans. The Sisters worked among the poor, the sick, the elderly and slaves. The order founded a school for girls in 1850 and in 1860 opened a hospital for needy Black residents of New Orleans.
Information courtesy of www.aaregistry.com
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