Introduction xvii
ordained by the church. Lee would go on to deliver hundreds of sermons
across thousands of miles, as far north as Canada and as far south as Maryland.
She was one of the first American women to have her work Life and Religious
Experience of Jarena Lee (1836) to reach a mass audience through print.
Zilpha Elaw, born near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to free black parents,
was an itinerant minister and one of the earliest published African American
female ministers along with Lee. In her autobiographical narrative Memoirs
of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha
Elaw, an American Female of Colour, she proclaims that a spiritual awakening
influenced her to become a preacher. Elaw founded a school in Burlington,
New Jersey, for black women in 1823, and included in her sermons discussions
about her status as a woman and how Christianity made it possible for her to
attack the injustice of racism and women’s inequality. She would eventually
go on to preach in homes, revival camps, and welcoming pulpits in America
and England. Julia Foote, daughter of former slaves, born in Schenectady,
New York, was the first women to be ordained a deacon in the A.M.E. Zion
Church, and the second ordained female elder in the A.M.E. Zion Church.
Foote was initially criticized by her church, parents, and husband when she
insisted that she had been called by God to preach and was sanctioned by her
minister for having services in her home. She eventually went on to preach
in New York, various New England states, and Canada. Julia Foote published
her autobiography A Brand Plucked from the Fire in 1879. African American
women were able to use the black church as an apparatus to forge pathways to
public leadership as well as auxiliary agencies such as the Female Union and
Daughters of Zion throughout the 19th century. Christianity was also used as
a vehicle to attack slavery and advance the cause of abolitionism. The issue
of slavery was the most volatile political issue in American society through
“the turbulent 1850s” into the Civil War.
Slavery was a central issue in American politics since the creation of the
U.S. Constitution through the Civil War and black women were significant
voices in calling for the abolition of slavery in the 19th century. Maria Stew-
art (1803–1879), Sojourner Truth (1797–1883), and Frances E. W. Harper
(1825–1911) were three of the most prominent African American women
within the abolitionist movement of the mid-19th century. With their
speeches, narratives, and writings, these women helped to make slavery an
issue in American national politics through the Civil War era.
Maria Stewart, born in 1803, in Hartford, Connecticut, to free black
parents, was an essayist, lecturer, and ardent abolitionist who wrote for
the antislavery publication The Liberator. She was the first female public
speaker in American history to have her speeches published and one of the
first women in U.S. history to deliver a speech to an audience composed
