As we near the end of Women’s History Month and reflect on so many amazing women, it is befitting also to recognize their courage of self-expression. Throughout history, the language women chose to describe their experiences and themselves as they saw fit – Black women especially – has always been a weighted one.
For centuries, society overshadowed Black women, leaving their voices undetected and unheard, a practice so common that most are conditioned to both consciously and unconsciously participate in it. But, sometimes, even in the most impenetrable of silences, the most resounding power can be made.
That is the case for Elizabeth Keckley, an African American seamstress, activist and author whose remarkable life story is an illuminating example of a woman whose talents and audacity gave her license to use her voice outside of servitude to white people in the 18th century. Not only was she one of the most sought-after dressmakers of the time, but she bought her own way out of enslavement and published one of the most controversial and bluntest autobiographies, exposing the secrets of the highest-profiled political family of the era.
Born into slavery in 1818, in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, Keckley’s mother taught her how to sew when she was a child so she could help to mend and make clothes for the family that owned them both. While she proved to have a natural aptitude for needlework and tailoring and was well-liked by the slave owner’s children (they allowed her to learn how to read and write), her life was an arduous one. She endured whippings and other forms of abuse and as a young woman, was raped by her owner and bore his child, her only son, George.
Eventually, the family moved to Missouri and took Elizabeth and George along with them. They had financial issues, so she supported them by making dresses for St. Louis socialites. In doing so, she acquired a favorable reputation and a large clientele of her own.
In 1855, while committed to sovereignty for herself and her son, Keckley asked to purchase their freedom. Her owner intentionally proposed $1200.00, an amount he thought impossible for a Black woman to achieve at the time. With the money she had earned and saved, along with loans she raised from the connections she built within the free Black community and from her white patrons, the talented dressmaker proved him wrong.
After having worked in Missouri for five years or so to repay the loans, Keckley moved to Washington, D.C. to start a life free of debt and slavery.
Soon after, she became the go-to dressmaker for Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and for many of D.C.’s political and social elite. By the early 1860s, she was managing around twenty seamstresses and selling gowns to the wives of politicians like Robert E. Lee and Stephen A. Douglas. Known as a fashion maker, Keckley gained enormous power in the nation’s capital: white women wore what she told them to.
Keckley was also Mary Lincoln’s confidant, but the relationship would end a few years after President Lincoln was assassinated when Keckley wrote and published a revealing memoir that was met with overwhelming disapproval, especially by the First Lady .
The historical work, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (first published in 1868) is considered one of the most poignant, candid, yet controversial narratives of the period. Whites turned on Keckley because they felt the 166-page publication violated social norms of Victorian boundaries, race, class and gender. Unlike the “slave narratives” that came before, she used language in a different way – one that represented upward mobility, possibilities for post-slavery African Americans and a new, emancipated Black self.
Keckley detailed her life in her own way, recounting untold hardships of mistreatment, violence, unwelcome sexual advances and rape by white men, as well as private moments about her close relationships with the Lincolns – astonishing language from the often ignored voice of a household laborer. She did not intend to slander anyone; she only wanted to speak her truth and to portray Mary Lincoln as a real person who, just like her, struggled emotionally and endured severe hardship. Still, Mary expressed a sense of betrayal (letters she wrote to Keckley were published in the book’s appendix), so she felt her private life – intimate moments in the White House with her husband and children – were now out there for the world to see.
The decision to write about her enslavers and employers also enraged outside audiences because, in addition to her fearless representation as a former slave, Keckley was an influential, confident Black woman with financial success, perhaps greater than white readers. They labeled her an “angry negro servant” who had “forgotten her place” and waged a barrage of vicious attacks on her, along with vulgar responses and reviews, many of which included parodies littered with racial slurs. As a result, she lost most of her clientele and faced anger from other Black people, as they felt her actions jeopardized and targeted them, too.
Fully aware she would likely ruffle feathers, in the preface to her memoir, Keckley upheld her “secret history” as a thoughtful act of truth-telling and offered context into Mary Lincoln’s life: “It may be charged that I have written too freely on some questions, especially in regard to Mrs. Lincoln. I do not think so.”
After the book was published, Mary Lincoln and Keckley never spoke again. Keckley went on to establish Wilberforce University, the nation’s first college founded and owned by Black educators (she led their dress department). She was also a social activist, having raised awareness and resources for newly freed people and Civil War veterans.
Facing financial troubles of her own, Keckley eventually died of a stroke in 1907 at the Home for Destitute Women and Children – an organization she helped to create – in Washington, D.C.
Although the American public was not prepared for a free, Black woman assuming control over her own life at the time, however, more than a century later, Elizabeth Keckley is recognized and hailed as one of the greatest pioneers in fashion and in American history at large.
She deserves it.
