https://archive.blackgothamarchive.org/items/browse/?tags=women&output=atom <![CDATA[Black Gotham Archive]]> 2018-07-10T17:30:40-04:00 Omeka https://archive.blackgothamarchive.org/items/show/65/ <![CDATA[Mrs. Sarah J. S. Garnet]]>
Devoting herself to feminist causes, Sarah founded the Equal Suffrage Club in the late 1880s which she kept going until her death in 1911. At the end of her teaching career, she joined other women of her grade in the school system to fight for “equal pay for equal work.”
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Title

Mrs. Sarah J. S. Garnet

Description

Sarah Garnet was the oldest child of a large and prosperous Long Island family. A student in the New York public school system, at age fourteen she was appointed monitor under the supervision of John Peterson. Like Maritcha, she spent her entire career in education; she was the first black woman appointed principal of a Manhattan grammar school. She was briefly married to Henry Highland Garnet, but separated from him after a year of marriage.

Devoting herself to feminist causes, Sarah founded the Equal Suffrage Club in the late 1880s which she kept going until her death in 1911. At the end of her teaching career, she joined other women of her grade in the school system to fight for “equal pay for equal work.”

Source

NYPL ID number: 1819714
Harry A. Williamson papers: additions, 1881-1962

Rights

Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Still Image Item Type Metadata

Original Format

photograph
]]> https://archive.blackgothamarchive.org/items/show/64/ <![CDATA[Dr. Susan Maria Smith McKinney Steward, Physician]]>
In her medical practice, Steward treated both blacks and whites, and specialized in childhood diseases such as marasmus (a wasting away of the body). White newspapers of the time noted that she had “a handsome bank account and lives well [in the] fashionable quarter of the hill.” Given that homeopathy was much more liberal than traditional branches of medicine, McKinney was welcomed into its professional associations, and became a member of state and county homeopathic societies. Unlike her sister, she was able successfully to combine marriage, work, and feminism. ]]> 2012-07-17T22:43:02-04:00

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Title

Dr. Susan Maria Smith McKinney Steward, Physician

Description

Susan McKinney Steward was Sarah Garnet's younger sister, and equally energetic and ambitious. Admitted to the New York Medical College for Women, a homeopathetic school founded by a wealthy white abolitionist woman, Clarence Sophia Lozier, McKinney graduated as class valedictorian in 1870.

In her medical practice, Steward treated both blacks and whites, and specialized in childhood diseases such as marasmus (a wasting away of the body). White newspapers of the time noted that she had “a handsome bank account and lives well [in the] fashionable quarter of the hill.” Given that homeopathy was much more liberal than traditional branches of medicine, McKinney was welcomed into its professional associations, and became a member of state and county homeopathic societies. Unlike her sister, she was able successfully to combine marriage, work, and feminism.

Source

NYPL: psnypl_scg_394
Portrait Collection

Date

1870

Rights

Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Still Image Item Type Metadata

Original Format

Photograph
]]> https://archive.blackgothamarchive.org/items/show/63/ <![CDATA[Victoria Earle Matthews]]>
Matthews devoted herself to settlement activities among poverty stricken black New Yorkers similar to Jane Addams’ work with immigrant families in Chicago. She taught black women how to keep house and established a center to train black girls in domestic work. In 1897, she founded the White Rose Mission to rescue black women recently arrived from the South from the lures of urban life, especially seduction and prostitution.

Matthews was the driving force behind the 1892 creation of the Woman’s Loyal Union, a club for black women. She was also instrumental in founding the black women's club magazine, Woman’s Era, a couple of years later. In its first year, Matthews was president of the Woman’s Loyal Union, while Sarah Garnet and Maritcha Lyons were first and second vice-president respectively.

Following the example set by Ida B. Wells in her antilynching campaign, the Woman's Loyal Union took as its mission the gathering of accurate information about black Americans which they then planned to distribute to both blacks and whites. its members devised a questionnaire to send to black ministers, school teachers, and other public minded leaders asking them to help compile accurate statistics about blacks natonwide, investigate charges of black immorality in the South, and correct existing misperceptions. The women also wrote leaflets on such topics as “Parents and Guardians” and the “Sanctity of Home” to circulate among the masses, hoping that a wider print distribution would be more effective than lecturing to small audiences.
. ]]> 2012-07-17T22:42:32-04:00

Dublin Core

Title

Victoria Earle Matthews

Description

Victoria Earle Matthews was born a slave, the child of a Georgia slaveholder and one of his female slaves. Her mother escaped north during the Civil War, returning after emancipation to claim her children. By 1873 the family had settled in New York where Matthews attended grammar school before family finances obliged her to go to work. Engaged as a servant in a white household, she was given free access to her employers’ library, beginning a lifelong career of self-improvement.

Matthews devoted herself to settlement activities among poverty stricken black New Yorkers similar to Jane Addams’ work with immigrant families in Chicago. She taught black women how to keep house and established a center to train black girls in domestic work. In 1897, she founded the White Rose Mission to rescue black women recently arrived from the South from the lures of urban life, especially seduction and prostitution.

Matthews was the driving force behind the 1892 creation of the Woman’s Loyal Union, a club for black women. She was also instrumental in founding the black women's club magazine, Woman’s Era, a couple of years later. In its first year, Matthews was president of the Woman’s Loyal Union, while Sarah Garnet and Maritcha Lyons were first and second vice-president respectively.

Following the example set by Ida B. Wells in her antilynching campaign, the Woman's Loyal Union took as its mission the gathering of accurate information about black Americans which they then planned to distribute to both blacks and whites. its members devised a questionnaire to send to black ministers, school teachers, and other public minded leaders asking them to help compile accurate statistics about blacks natonwide, investigate charges of black immorality in the South, and correct existing misperceptions. The women also wrote leaflets on such topics as “Parents and Guardians” and the “Sanctity of Home” to circulate among the masses, hoping that a wider print distribution would be more effective than lecturing to small audiences.
.

Creator

Joseph Fischl

Source

NYPL: psnypl_scg_385
Portrait Collection

Date

1903

Rights

Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Still Image Item Type Metadata

Original Format

Photograph
]]> https://archive.blackgothamarchive.org/items/show/62/ <![CDATA[Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist and civil rights activist]]>
After Wells reached New York, T.Thomas Fortune and my grandfather, Jerome B. Peterson, invited her to continue her anti-lynching campaign from the pages of the New York Age. Brooklyn women joined in. Maritcha Lyons and Victoria Earle Matthews rounded up their many friends and acquaintances to host a testimonial dinner for Wells. The dinner was a great success, and, according to Wells, marked the beginning of the club movement among the colored women. It provided the impetus for New York and Brooklyn women to create their club, the Woman’s Loyal Union. Maritcha, Matthews, Sarah Garnet, and Susan McKinney were among the club’s founders.

]]> 2012-07-17T22:42:06-04:00

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Title

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist and civil rights activist

Description

Ida B. Wells was the galvanizing force that propelled Brooklyn’s black women into public activism. Originally from Mississippi, Wells moved to Memphis in the early 1880s and embarked on a career in journalism. In 1889 she became editor and partner of the Free Speech, publishing militant editorials against the practice of lynching that was sweeping the South and praising those blacks who resisted. In 1892, lynching hit close to home when three of Wells’s Memphis friends defended their grocery store agains a white mob that wanted it closed. Afer a police deputy was shot and seriously wounded, the three men were lynched. Wells wrote a series of angry editorials condemning lynching. In response, the local white newspaper called for her lynching, but Wells was already headed north.

After Wells reached New York, T.Thomas Fortune and my grandfather, Jerome B. Peterson, invited her to continue her anti-lynching campaign from the pages of the New York Age. Brooklyn women joined in. Maritcha Lyons and Victoria Earle Matthews rounded up their many friends and acquaintances to host a testimonial dinner for Wells. The dinner was a great success, and, according to Wells, marked the beginning of the club movement among the colored women. It provided the impetus for New York and Brooklyn women to create their club, the Woman’s Loyal Union. Maritcha, Matthews, Sarah Garnet, and Susan McKinney were among the club’s founders.

Source

NYPL: psnypl_scg_515
Portrait Collection

Rights

Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Still Image Item Type Metadata

Original Format

Photograph
]]> https://archive.blackgothamarchive.org/items/show/61/ <![CDATA[Maritcha Lyons]]>
In adulthood, Maritcha was able to fulfill her lifelong ambition of becoming a school teacher. In her memoir, she credited the many people who helped her at every step of the way. In childhood, there were her parents, who “made over a sickly, peevish, unproposing [sic] girl into a woman with a new lease on life” and sacrificed so that she could “attain what was regarded in my youth as a liberal education for a woman.” Later came her teachers, most esepcially Charles Reason.

Maritcha devoted herself to elementary education. She began at Colored School no. 1, later P.S. 67, where Charles Dorsey, another member of Brooklyn’s black elite, was principal and the much admired Georgiana Putnam assistant principal. There, Maritcha progressed from teaching the lowest primary grade to instructing the graduating class. Ten years later, she was hired as the assistant principal of P.S. 83 under the directorship of Frank Harding whose further mentoring helped her become, in her own words, “useful and efficient.”

Thanks to her long career Maritcha developed a well-defined set of teaching principles. Recognizing that elementary education was the full extent of what the majority of children—black or white, native born or immigrant—would receive, Maritcha saw herself as providing “the education of the masses rather than of the classes.” She believed that there were three essential components to their education: information, which included not only book knowledge but also critical thinking; elevation, or moral development and the formation of personality; and the cultivation of the mind-body connection since she was convinced that control over muscles led to greater mental readiness and concentration.

In 1892, Maritcha moved beyond the female sphere of elementary school teaching into political activism. That year she debated Ida B. Wells at the Brooklyn Literary Union and, in the eyes of many, won the debate. The two women became close friends. Maritcha mentored Wells “extempore speaking"; in turn, it was Wells who convinced Maritcha and her friends to start a black women's club in Brooklyn, the Woman's Loyal Union.

]]> 2012-07-17T22:41:41-04:00

Dublin Core

Title

Maritcha Lyons

Description

This is a photograph of Maritcha as an adult.

In adulthood, Maritcha was able to fulfill her lifelong ambition of becoming a school teacher. In her memoir, she credited the many people who helped her at every step of the way. In childhood, there were her parents, who “made over a sickly, peevish, unproposing [sic] girl into a woman with a new lease on life” and sacrificed so that she could “attain what was regarded in my youth as a liberal education for a woman.” Later came her teachers, most esepcially Charles Reason.

Maritcha devoted herself to elementary education. She began at Colored School no. 1, later P.S. 67, where Charles Dorsey, another member of Brooklyn’s black elite, was principal and the much admired Georgiana Putnam assistant principal. There, Maritcha progressed from teaching the lowest primary grade to instructing the graduating class. Ten years later, she was hired as the assistant principal of P.S. 83 under the directorship of Frank Harding whose further mentoring helped her become, in her own words, “useful and efficient.”

Thanks to her long career Maritcha developed a well-defined set of teaching principles. Recognizing that elementary education was the full extent of what the majority of children—black or white, native born or immigrant—would receive, Maritcha saw herself as providing “the education of the masses rather than of the classes.” She believed that there were three essential components to their education: information, which included not only book knowledge but also critical thinking; elevation, or moral development and the formation of personality; and the cultivation of the mind-body connection since she was convinced that control over muscles led to greater mental readiness and concentration.

In 1892, Maritcha moved beyond the female sphere of elementary school teaching into political activism. That year she debated Ida B. Wells at the Brooklyn Literary Union and, in the eyes of many, won the debate. The two women became close friends. Maritcha mentored Wells “extempore speaking"; in turn, it was Wells who convinced Maritcha and her friends to start a black women's club in Brooklyn, the Woman's Loyal Union.

Source

NYPL: psnypl_scg_219
Harry A. Williamson Photograph Collection

Date

circa 1900s

Rights

Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Still Image Item Type Metadata

Original Format

photograph
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