LCP Summer Mellon Scholars Spotlight
Gwendolyn Dickey
Sewanee-The University of the South
During my time at the Library Company of Philadelphia, I researched women’s forms of maternity, especially enslaved African women, which I call alternative maternity. I utilize definitions of motherhood from the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1908), edited by Sir James A. H. Murray, which I discovered at the Library Company, to construct my definition. Alternative maternity refers to Brown women who have either given birth or provided maternal care and protection to children. The study spans the late 18th and 19th centuries in the United States and Haiti with a focus on the social implications for Brown women’s motherhood based on each country’s constitution. Finally, “Brown” is used to define “Black,” “Haitian,” or “African-American” women in this research to encourage an accurate description of skin color.
To clarify, the 1806 Haitian Constitution was the first institutionalized document of the Republic of Haiti during its time of disunification. Henri Christophe maintained a monarchy in the North while Alexandre Pétion established the Republic of Haiti in the south of the island. The ten constitutions, revised and drafted in the years to follow, are based on the 1806 model. I hoped to come across a few materials on Haitian women’s motherhood at the Library Company but relied mostly on secondary sources. According to those sources, enslaved Haitian women entered relationships with white colonists, which could lead to greater social mobility and potential security for their children.
I also encountered the work of Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry in the LCP archives. A Creole lawyer and politician born in Martinique in 1750, Saint-Méry’s work, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (Description topographic, physical, civil, political and historic of the French part of the island Saint-Domingue), written in 1789 through two volumes, provides context for Haitian women’s motherhood. For example, he includes in his description that enslaved Brown women in Haitian could be manumitted for breastfeeding a white child because nursing was a revered service. Yet, enslaved women in the United States were not.
I developed a few questions to guide my research. What roles were given to Brown women in the legal documents of these nations? What were the social restraints and expectations of women in these societies? How can we learn about the personal experiences of Brown mothers from the expectations for white mothers? These questions influenced the sources chosen to further my research interest.
I also consulted Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (1861), William M. Capp’s The Daughter: Her Health, Education, and Wedlock. Homely Suggestions for Mothers and Daughters (1891), The Mother’s Assistant and the Young Lady’s Friend by William C. Brown (1850), and a book titled Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life. Occasionally, I found myself pulled in other directions, which widened the frame of my initial questions. I began asking questions like: Are there exceptions to white women’s maternity? What are the complexities of enslavement for Brown men and women, and how do these complexities transcend time? Can we begin to recognize the agency of enslaved women in motherhood? Finally, what happened in the instances when white women birthed children by enslaved men?
Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl left a powerful impression by debunking the idea that enslaved women did not exercise agency over their bodies and families. Enslaved women worked within the boundaries of their lives to continue caring for their children first. As Jacobs suffered harassment from her enslaver about her celibacy, she decided to be with another white man, knowing her condition as an enslaved person and the intended circumstances of her children. This “incident” could be a window to explore the various instances when enslaved women, in Haiti and the United States, exercised similar agency over their bodies.
Although they are not mentioned in the founding documents of the United States and Haiti, Brown women were instrumental in slave societies as wet-nurses, seamstresses, laborers, and mistresses to enslavers, and the protectors of their children. My research illuminates the reality that enslaved women in both societies recognized their social status as enslaved and worked to ensure their children would be better off.
As Frances E.W. Harper aptly noted decades later in 1893, “It is the women of a country who help to mold its character, and to influence, if not determine, its destiny.”
Faith Page
The College of William & Mary
Friendship albums were popular among affluent women of the Victorian period and included entries on motherhood, female refinement, friendship and love. Out of the Victorian friendship albums left behind today, only four are by Black women and three of the four are at the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Friendship albums were meant to circulate around the owner’s friends and family and would eventually be filled with poems, essays, letters, watercolors and other expressions of thoughts and emotions. Mary Anne and Martina Dickerson’s friendship albums show how Black women in the North experienced and remembered motherhood. The books were started by the sisters when they were around eleven years old and span from 1840 to 1846 (Martina Dickerson) and 1832 to 1882 (Mary Anne Dickerson). The Library Company’s holdings also encompass scholarly articles and books that provide historical context for the albums, such as “‘Forget Me Not’: Free Black Women and Sentimentality” by Jasmine Nichole Cobb and “Freedom Flora: Botanical Revision and Community in African American Friendship Albums” by Katherine Isabel Bondy.
The albums of the Dickerson sisters helped me to understand how the sisters and their peers viewed motherhood as free women before and after the passing of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. The albums include passages of devotion from mothers to children, as well as poetic letters addressed to children who passed away, most notably “The Mother’s Joy,” a poem in the Mary Anne’s album. While caring for a young child is important to a mother of any circumstance, Black mothers prized the opportunity more ardently because it was rarely a guarantee. Poems like “To my dear Willie” were written with late children in mind. The poem in Mary Anne’s album is signed “his mother,” yet it refers to his “parents” instead of focusing solely on motherhood. In many cases female and male contributors to the albums drew connections between the role of Black mothers and the responsibilities of Black fathers, placing an emphasis on the Black family. In freedom, Black women lived with the fathers of their children as a family unit, unlike those in slavery who were separated. Black women had the “right” to bear children under slavery, but rarely did they get the chance to parent those children as they or their partners would have liked.
The Dickerson albums provide sources of information about the decisions related to African American motherhood in the North. Even though the albums are split between two sisters, they contain a myriad of views from the owners and their circle of family and friends. Passages regarding the care of children, the importance of the Black family, and genealogy are indelibly marked on each page. The friendship albums provide insight into the domestic roles, experiences, and agency of Black mothers in the free North.
Tristan White
University of Texas, San Antonio
I’m Tristan White, an Afro-Latino student from South Texas completing my undergraduate in History at the University of Texas San Antonio. My experience as an intern in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia has granted me the opportunity to fulfill this necessary training in my historical education and allowed me to take back home much to share about the African diasporic experience. My independent study focuses on Afro-Dandyism in the 19th century. As an intern, I not only learned a lot about the Black past by using LCP’s archives but also by visiting many archives in the city that include rich records on the Black experience, most especially at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the rare book room and manuscript collections at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia City archives. I also learned a great deal about Black history by taking many tours sponsored by the internship program.
My project focuses primarily on late nineteenth- early twentieth-century Afro-Dandyism in Philadelphia, particularly African American women’s fashion from Emancipation to women’s Suffrage in 1919. Black (or interchangeably Afro) Dandyism relates to the European cultural character of the dandy himself, but rather, its essence is intermixed with the internal logic of Black culture’s expressive form. According to literary critic and historian Monica Miller, Afro-Dandyism exists as a means for the presence of individual identity, and survival of dignity through cultural practices that combat historically contingent oppression. Miller authored the leading book on this topic, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity,
While Miller’s excellent work touches mostly on the Afro-Dandy’s critique of Western masculinity, I oriented my research question around how African American women in Philadelphia used fashion to construct identity, convey respectability, and display bodily autonomy in an era that so desperately aimed to remove these rights from them. I frequently referenced Jennifer L. Morgan’s Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (from this internship’s curriculum) to examine gendered oppression and evolving concepts of resistance in relation to colonial views of enslaved and formerly enslaved women. I also drew on Brent White and Graham White’s Stylin; African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit, especially their chapter on the “Dandies and Dandizettes.”
The Library Company’s team, especially the great Erika Piola of the Graphics Arts Department, were immeasurably helpful in refining my study during my time in the archives. A significant portion of my time was spent with the “Dickerson Cased Family Portraits Collection,” due to the family’s prominence in Philadelphia’s African American cultural and intellectual communities and the alignment of their attire with the fashion trends of that period. I then contrasted these images with racist caricature art from the “Life in Philadelphia Collection” Many mainstream publications, including outlets in London, reported on the phenomenon of Afro-Dandyism in Philadelphia as a global spectacle, but caricatured Black people’s dress.
These different aspects of graphic arts research supported an approach that Dr. Jim Downs described as “finding the silences” in archives. By analyzing European Americans documents, I found evidence about the Afro-Dandies themselves. Working with scholars and authors, including Lori Ginzburg on Tangled Journeys; One Family’s Story and The Making of American History, deepened my research skills through hands-on experience in the LCP archives and significantly shaped my view of historiography. Dr. Ginzburg identifies areas of contingency in the records as “whispers,” which indicates that the absence of marginalized voices.
LCP, along with the experiential crash course on the history of the Northeast U.S., has deeply shaped me as a person and aspiring scholar. I intend to pursue a doctorate, guided by this experience and the scholars I’ve met.
