Hello friends, welcome!

So glad you're here.

As we have been working our way through first ladies.

There have been some general similarities, right?

Many of our early White House hostesses and their presidential counterparts came from

well-connected wealthy families with European ancestry.

What they all had in common was access, access to education, to new ideas, to land, to

money, access to each other, and the freedom to make decisions about the trajectory of their

lives.

So, let's put this particular formula for how to be a political influencer in 18th and

19th century America on the shelf.

Instead, we're going to talk about a person who, by the mid-1800s, was shaping some of

the biggest social reform movements to come out of the nation's antebellum era.

A person who was born with no access and no rights.

A person who was born into enslavement.

I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting.

I know I've used the term antebellum a few times over the past few episodes, but we haven't

really discussed it in greater detail.

So let's at the stage.

The antebellum era is a time period in American history that historians generally sandwiched

between two wars, the War of 1812 and the Civil War.

It's a time that was defined by the widening polarization of the country.

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