Mary Ann Shadd Cary's Endeavours In Activism

Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s Endeavours in Activism Mary Ann Shadd Cary was born into an elite free black community in the 19th century. Due to her economically privileged upbringing, she was able to occupy positions of power and became a teacher, abolitionist and activist to diminish poverty among black Canadians. She left the United States in 1851 to flee to Canada in order to contribute in freeing black slaves and better the lives of women. Shadd Cary made tremendous contributions to women’s rights and the abolition of black slavery; although, the challenges prevailed and risks that she encountered from individuals with privilege ultimately were secluded due to the binary of racism and sexism. Shadd Cary’s consistent efforts to create a better
After earning a degree in law, she devoted much of her time to women’s rights. She was a supporter of women suffrage in the United States in the 1950s (Calloway-Thomas 11). As a newspaper editor and political writer with some economic privilege, she was able to publish suffrage activities. This was vital in spreading knowledge as it was very rare for a powerful man to publish these updates. Furthermore, Shadd Cary testified to the House Judiciary Committee in regards to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, showing her support for them while arguing that they must not insert the word male within the Amendments (Calloway-Thomas 11). She fought intensely for equal rights between men and women as well as blacks and whites. This also involved her participation in as representative of the Associate for the Advancement of Women, political activism, the Philadelphia Coloured Convention, and the National Women Suffrage Association. Through her advancements within sexism, other women were able to learn and benefit from her
Although she emerged from a privileged family, this was unable to protect her from “the raced and gendered discrimination she faced while participating in movements in which race and racial equality were framed as male and in which sexual equality was framed as white” (Cali 33). These sexist and racist ideas prevented her to gain rights as the system in place refused equality to black women. Though her family, activist and professional relationships helped her to become a educator, newspaper editor and activist, “none of this privilege translated to her protection from the raced and gendered hegemony that governed public opinion and ideology in the mid-nineteenth-century” (Cali 34). Shadd Cary took extensive risks in order to overcome this ideology, as women in this time were not supposed to stray from social