In this double episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, "Black Women and Female Abolitionists in Print," 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 that we published on the WPHP site between June 19th and July 31st 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, 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 in print during the Romantic period. This episode discusses 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 century.
This episode has been peer reviewed as part of Romanticism on the Net's special issue, "Romanticism, Interrupted." For more information, as well as links to the spotlight series, see the blog post on the WPHP website.