Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Mothering On Maple Avenue: An Exploration Of African American Women’S Agency In Nineteenth Century Germantown, New York, Cheyenne R. Cutter

Senior Projects Spring 2020

National discourse on womanhood and mothering in nineteenth century America positioned these fields of women’s practices as sites of privilege for middle-class Anglo-American women, and as inaccessible to their African American contemporaries. After gaining their nominal freedom through New York’s manumission of enslaved individual around 1830, African American families had to confront their new reality to find ways to articulate their position within American society. How then, did the African American women of the Persons family, who occupied the Maple Avenue Parsonage in Germantown, New York during the nineteenth century, confront this new reality? What position within society did they …