The gendered makers of settlers: Sarah Stegeman, Becoming Americo-Liberian: African American Women, Culture, and the Creation of Liberia, 1840-1912, PhD dissertation, Syracuse University, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The gendered makers of settlers: Sarah Stegeman, Becoming Americo-Liberian: African American Women, Culture, and the Creation of Liberia, 1840-1912, PhD dissertation, Syracuse University, 2025

29Sep25

Abstract: This dissertation highlights the role of early Black American women settlers in creating a distinct Americo-Liberian identity that served as the centerpiece of Liberian independence. Most histories of colonization focus on male settlers and consider settlement a transplanting of American culture in Liberia. The women of the Waring, Lewis, and Roberts family established new homes in Liberia, and their homemaking efforts sustained the colony and the nation. This examination of elite Americo -Liberian women’s efforts to present their domestic skills, educational attainment, and proper behavior to a global audience was essential to nation-building in Liberia. Women’s cultivation of kinship and familial structures was also central to this unique Americo-Liberian identity, which was dedicated to maintaining the respectability of their elite social status in Liberia and establishing their difference from indigenous Liberians. Rather than looking inward to indigenous Liberians to help build the nation, these women looked outward to the U.S. and Great Britain for support. This project brings women and domesticity into the history of Americo-Liberians through print, material culture, and manuscript sources from the United States, Britain, and West Africa, and offers a new focus on the women settlers who created and represented Liberia in the nineteenth century.

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