ABSTRACT
An ardent Christian, Maria W Stewart was the first woman, black or white, to lecture publicly in the US on slavery. She contributed to Garrison's abolitionist paper, The Liberator, in the early 1830s and could thus directly address her fellow free blacks, an important constituent of the readership in the Boston area. She here advocates that blacks help themselves through parental, and particularly mothers' concern for education and the development of Christian virtue in their children so that in future African Americans could more effectively challenge their oppression. She also looked to mutual aid and institution-building within the black community.
