A Few Words Worn around the Edges, Pressed into Something Soft: Ten West Coast Women Printers
Women have been involved in the printing and production of books in what became the United States since Elizabeth Glover established a press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 forced her to flee the United States, Mary Ann Shadd, an African American woman, founded and published The Provincial Freeman, an antislavery newspaper, in 1853 in Ontario, Canada.