Maria W. Stewart’s “The First Stage of Life”: Black Girlhood in theRepository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art

Abstract

“The First Stage of Life” (1861) is a six-page short story by Maria W. Stewart, African American woman writer, orator, and activist. It is serialized in three parts in the Repository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art in April, July, and October 1861. From 1858 to 1863, the Repository was a black magazine administered by black men and designed for black readers. It was based in Indianapolis, and in 1861 its chief editor was John Mifflin Brown. Published quarterly with each edition containing just over twenty bound pages of poems, parables, and essays, the magazine attracted black households with rising amounts of disposable income and leisure time. Today, the Repository is a non-circulating, non-digitized, rare black magazine on microfilm at the Indiana State Library with one extant issue housed in Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Stewart’s serialized story about a black girl’s coming-of-age published in an early black magazine broadens the contributions African American women have made to nineteenth-century print culture, and her early emphasis on black girlhood invites further study on the methodologies, frameworks, and emerging trends that continue to shape the canon of early African American literature and print culture. This article explores what we gain by examining the intersection of black girlhood and black print culture studies. To define black girlhood, nineteenth-century African American women writers distinguish between youthful and knowing girlhood, a demarcation that is represented by a black girl’s age and offers rhetorical advantages for race activists. Identifying black girls as youthful and therefore childlike removes sexual suggestion from their bodies. The growth from youthful to prematurely knowing girlhood occurs when black girls gain a deepened awareness of their precarious positions and seek methods for their survival. To emphasize a black girl’s age as a textual marker recognizes that, similar to all women, black women in the antebellum period experience a youthful period and undergo distinct stages of growth and maturity into