Maria W. Stewart (née Miller) (1803 – December 17, 1879) was an American writer, lecturer, teacher, and activist from Hartford, Connecticut.

After retiring from lecturing, she worked as a school teacher and later became the head matron at at Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, D.C. Stewart died in 1879.

David Walker was a prominent abolitionist and a member of the General Colored Association, and he influenced Maria Stewart's views on social justice and activism.

His piece on race relations entitled David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), called for Black people to rise against oppression and demand their rights.

[3] Although her speeches were controversial William Lloyd Garrison, a friend and the central figure of the abolitionist movement, published all four in his newspaper, The Liberator, the first three individually, and later, all four together.

She delivered her farewell lectures on September 21, 1833, in the schoolroom of the African Meeting House, known then as the Belknap Street Church, and as of 2019 part of Boston's Black Heritage Trail.

Stewart challenged her audience to emulate the valor of the pilgrims and American revolutionaries in demanding freedom, and advised them to establish institutions such as grocery stores and churches to support their community.

She once wrote, having lost my position in Williamsburg, Long Island, and hearing the colored people were more religious and God-fearing in the South, I wended my way to Baltimore in 1852.

But I found all was not gold that glistened; and when I saw the want of means for the advancement of the common English branches, with no literary resources for the improvement of the mind scarcely, I threw myself at the foot of the Cross, resolving to make the best of a bad bargain ...[9]Stewart was shocked at the miserable conditions of black people in Maryland, a slave state, where a relatively high percentage of black people were free.

..."[9] Stewart was born free and Keckley a slave, but both women saw a need to be active in the burgeoning civil rights movement of the late 19th century.

As one writer said: Women in the black churches were relegated to positions that posed no real threat to the power structure maintained by preachers, deacons, and other male leaders.

She used her platform to talk about racial injustices and sexism by highlighting the contradictions between the message of peace and unity preached from the pulpits of the white churches versus the reality of the slavery.

According to one writer: "For Stewart, this ... newly freed community ... barely one generation from slavery, yearning for a fully realized freedom rather than a nominal one.

While these two images may seem paradoxical to contemporary readers, they reflect the connection between sympathy and violence that permeated Stewart's theology and structured her concept of Christian community.

[13] This juxtaposition of Christian mercy and retributive violence also points to the crucial but often minimized role of African American women such as Stewart who were uniquely situated to collaborate with black nationalists and white abolitionists.

As an important figure in radical political action, Stewart helps us to better understand the multivalent forces that shaped resistance movements in the early nineteenth century.

[13] Maria Stewart delivered four public lectures that The Liberator published during her lifetime, addressing women's rights, moral and educational aspiration, occupational advancement, and the abolition of slavery.

Yet, after all, methinks were the American free people of color to turn their attention more assiduously to moral worth and intellectual improvement, this would be the result: prejudice would gradually diminish, and the whites would be compelled to say, unloose those fetters!In the same speech Stewart emphasized that African-American women were not so different from African-American men: Look at many of the most worthy and interesting of us doomed to spend our lives in gentlemen's kitchens.

They can be nothing but the humblest laborers, on account of their dark complexions ...She continued the theme that African Americans were subjected not only to Southern slavery but to Northern racism and economic structures: I have heard much respecting the horrors of slavery; but may Heaven forbid that the generality of my color throughout these United States should experience any more of its horrors than to be a servant of servants, or hewers of wood and drawers of water!

She challenged the supposed dichotomy between the inhumane enslavement of the South and the normal proceedings of capitalism in the North, arguing that the relegation of African Americans to service jobs was also a great injustice and waste of human potential.

The speech says in part: Most of our color have been taught to stand in fear of the white man from their earliest infancy, to work as soon as they could walk, and to call "master" before they scarce could lisp the name of mother.

Cast your eyes about, look as far as you can see; all, all is owned by the lordly white, except here and there a lowly dwelling which the man of color, midst deprivations, fraud, and opposition has been scarce able to procure.

[20] Additionally, Stewart is included in the first chapter of "Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought", edited by Beverly Guy Sheftall (1995),[21] The two speeches by Stewart "Religion And The Pure Principles of Morality, The Sure Foundation On Which We Must Build" and "Lecture Delivered at Franklin Hall" were widely incorporated into a Black Feminist tradition.

Maria Stewart was an African American activist, lecturer, and writer who made significant contributions to the abolitionist and women's rights movements.

Despite facing poverty and discrimination, Stewart's efforts have had a lasting impact on the fields of womanist theology and feminist studies.