My Heart Yet Bleeds

Published history of the 1800s typically focuses on the accomplishments of white men. But a discussion of the colonization of Liberia would be incomplete without including the women. This chapter focuses on the involvement of women, black and white, in the colonization movement and the settlement of Liberia. Only about 10 percent of all slave owners were women, yet 21 percent of those who emancipated and colonized slaves were female. In the first two decades of colonization, 45 percent of the immigrants to Liberia were female, many of them widows or single mothers with small children. This chapter opens with the tale of Emily Tubman, a white woman from Georgia striving to free her slaves for migration, and the chapter includes the stories of several black women who start new lives in Liberia.