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The WPHP Monthly Mercury, Episode 3: Black Women and Female Abolitionists in Print (August 2020)

Source: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/34

-> See the list of audio files

Podcast Episode Description

In this double episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, Episode 3: Black Women and Female Abolitionists in Print (August 2020), hosts Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt are joined by the entire team of the WPHP to speak to the Black Women’s and Abolition Print History Spotlight Series[1] that we published on the WPHP site between June 19 and July 31 in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests that erupted across the globe in response to police brutality and the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Featuring poet Phillis Wheatley,[2] bookseller Ann Sancho, author Mary Prince, abolitionists Elizabeth Heyrick and Lydia Maria Child, orator Maria W. Stewart, and the anonymous novel The Woman of Colour , these spotlights sought to celebrate and make visible Black women’s and radical abolitionist history as it appeared print during the Romantic period. In this episode, we discuss what the common threads and challenges we faced can tell us about Black women’s lives and the abolitionist movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

For more information, as well as links to the spotlight series, see the blog post on the WPHP website: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/34.

“Black Women and Female Abolitionists in Print”

The WPHP Monthly Mercury dives into the details of working on The Women’s Print History Project, a bibliographical database that traces women’s involvement in print between 1700 and 1836. Sharing the stories of prolific and not-so-prolific women authors and the oft-widowed women publishers, printers, and booksellers of the period, as well as the rabbit-hole-filled processes of recovery and the adventures of our research assistants, our project manager, and our project director, The WPHP Monthly Mercury centres the discovery of women and their work.

In this month’s double episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “Black Women and Female Abolitionists in Print”, the entire team of the WPHP joins hosts Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt to speak to the Black Women’s and Abolitionist Print History Spotlight Series that we published on the WPHP website between June 19 and July 31. [You can listen to this episode on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, and other podcast apps, available via Buzzsprout.]

In response to and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, this spotlight series is focused on the lives of, and books published by, three Black women authors during our period—Mary Prince, Phillis Wheatley, and Maria W. Stewart—as well as the ways in which white female abolitionists Lydia Maria Child and Elizabeth Heyrick exploited print’s powerful potential for eliminating slavery. The series also includes a spotlight on the anonymous 1808 novel, The Woman of Colour, and a spotlight on the one Black woman bookseller we have been able to identify thus far during our period—Ann Sancho, of whom we spoke in the July 2020 episode, “Women in the Imprints.”

In this episode, each member of our team speaks to the spotlight that they authored. You’ll hear from one of our WPHP Monthly Mercury hosts and Lead Editor, Kandice Sharren, about the role of authorship in her spotlight on the anonymous 1808 novel The Woman of Colour, “The Woman of Colour: Don’t Break the (Attribution) Chain”; our other podcast host and Lead Editor of Firms, Kate Moffatt, about the question of collecting and presenting racial data provoked by her spotlight on the Black woman bookseller, Ann Sancho, “A Search for Firm Evidence: Ann Sancho, Bookseller”; Sara Penn, research assistant, about the language of enslavement and the complexity of identifying contributors and determining genre that arose while writing her spotlight, “The First Slave Narrative by a Woman: The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave”; Amanda Law, research assistant, about the systemic racism that shaped the publication process for Phillis Wheatley, which Amanda discusses in detail in her spotlight “[The Transatlantic Publication of Phillis Wheatley’s] Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral ”; Victoria DeHart, research assistant, about women’s involvement in the radical branch of the abolition movement known as “immediatism,” explained more fully in her spotlight “Elizabeth Heyrick, Mother of Immediatism”; our Project Director, Michelle Levy, about the impact of uneven digitization and the intermixture of oral and print culture in the publications of Black author Maria W. Stewart in her spotlight, “Maria W. Stewart, Activist for ‘African rights and liberty’”; and from Hanieh Ghaderi, research assistant, on her spotlight, co-written with Kandice Sharren, “Lydia Maria Child’s Radical Appeal,” about the experience of working on a feminist title from the 1830s as a current Gender Studies student.

The episode examines the challenges faced and connections made in the writing of these spotlights, as well as the many learnings that both the spotlights and the creation of this episode prompted. From the frustrations with the gaps in records about Black women, to the transatlanticism of abolition, to the question of how to responsibly and ethically account for racial data in the WPHP, “Black Women and Female Abolitionists in Print” responds to the ethos of the current moment, centring the voices of Black people and the need for immediate and radical change while acknowledging how bibliography can guide us to a clearer understanding of the interactions between gender, race, abolition, and print.