Want to listen to the stories of these trailblazing women from Rhode Island's history during the Revolutionary War period? Click on the links here:
Duchess Quamino
Catharine Little Greene
Elizabeth Buffum Chase
Duchess Quamino
Catharine Little Greene
Elizabeth Buffum Chase
From Chains to Keys: Marcella and Maia as Duchess Quamino
Oil on canvas
29 X 36 inches
February 2026
Duchess Quamino (c. 1739-1804) was a formerly enslaved woman who, after gaining her freedom around 1780, became a highly respected caterer, cook, and household manager in revolutionary-era Newport, Rhode Island, a port city deeply entangled with the Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved for many years by William and Lucy Channing, a prominent white family, Quamino developed extraordinary culinary and managerial skill within their household. Following her emancipation, she continued to work for elite Newport families as a paid professional, transforming work once performed under bondage into a source of economic independence.
As a free Black woman and entrepreneur, Quamino built a successful catering and baking business, becoming known as “the Pastry Queen of Rhode Island.” Her earnings enabled her to support her children and family, a powerful achievement for a formerly enslaved woman in the late eighteenth century. Through this work, she occupied public and private spaces typically denied to Black women, moving with authority through households, churches, and community institutions.
Although Duchess Quamino was not an abolitionist leader in the later, organized sense, her life functioned as a living abolitionary argument. She was part of Newport’s free Black community that intersected with early antislavery thinkers, including Samuel Hopkins, whose abolitionist theology developed within a town where Black freedom was already being practiced and sustained by people like Quamino. Her competence, independence, and moral standing directly contradicted pro-slavery claims of Black dependency or incapacity. Her form of resistance was not petition or pamphlet, but practice: freedom enacted daily through skill, care, and economic self-determination.
Abolition Movement in Rhode Island
Rhode Island’s abolition movement unfolded within a landscape of deep contradiction, shaped by early moral opposition to slavery and continued economic dependence on it. In 1784, the state passed the Gradual Abolition Act, one of the earliest such laws in the United States, which declared that children born to enslaved women after that date would be legally free, though only after long periods of indenture, allowing slavery to persist in practice for decades. Quakers, free Black communities, and Black-led institutions in Providence and Newport pressed for education, civil rights, and full emancipation, while abolitionist societies organized petitions and public lectures. At the same time, Rhode Island’s rapidly growing textile industry, including mills like Slater Mill, relied heavily on Southern slave-grown cotton, tying the state’s prosperity to slavery even as many residents opposed it. This economic entanglement tempered abolitionist gains, delayed broader public support, and reveals how Rhode Island’s path toward abolition was marked by moral resistance operating within, and often against, the realities of industrial capitalism.
Oil on canvas
29 X 36 inches
February 2026
Duchess Quamino (c. 1739-1804) was a formerly enslaved woman who, after gaining her freedom around 1780, became a highly respected caterer, cook, and household manager in revolutionary-era Newport, Rhode Island, a port city deeply entangled with the Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved for many years by William and Lucy Channing, a prominent white family, Quamino developed extraordinary culinary and managerial skill within their household. Following her emancipation, she continued to work for elite Newport families as a paid professional, transforming work once performed under bondage into a source of economic independence.
As a free Black woman and entrepreneur, Quamino built a successful catering and baking business, becoming known as “the Pastry Queen of Rhode Island.” Her earnings enabled her to support her children and family, a powerful achievement for a formerly enslaved woman in the late eighteenth century. Through this work, she occupied public and private spaces typically denied to Black women, moving with authority through households, churches, and community institutions.
Although Duchess Quamino was not an abolitionist leader in the later, organized sense, her life functioned as a living abolitionary argument. She was part of Newport’s free Black community that intersected with early antislavery thinkers, including Samuel Hopkins, whose abolitionist theology developed within a town where Black freedom was already being practiced and sustained by people like Quamino. Her competence, independence, and moral standing directly contradicted pro-slavery claims of Black dependency or incapacity. Her form of resistance was not petition or pamphlet, but practice: freedom enacted daily through skill, care, and economic self-determination.
Abolition Movement in Rhode Island
Rhode Island’s abolition movement unfolded within a landscape of deep contradiction, shaped by early moral opposition to slavery and continued economic dependence on it. In 1784, the state passed the Gradual Abolition Act, one of the earliest such laws in the United States, which declared that children born to enslaved women after that date would be legally free, though only after long periods of indenture, allowing slavery to persist in practice for decades. Quakers, free Black communities, and Black-led institutions in Providence and Newport pressed for education, civil rights, and full emancipation, while abolitionist societies organized petitions and public lectures. At the same time, Rhode Island’s rapidly growing textile industry, including mills like Slater Mill, relied heavily on Southern slave-grown cotton, tying the state’s prosperity to slavery even as many residents opposed it. This economic entanglement tempered abolitionist gains, delayed broader public support, and reveals how Rhode Island’s path toward abolition was marked by moral resistance operating within, and often against, the realities of industrial capitalism.
Blazing the Trail for Feminism: Caroline and Kylie as Catharine Littlefield Greene
Oil on canvas
25 X 34 inches
March 2026
Catharine Littlefield Greene (1755–1814) lived at a moment when American women were formally excluded from political power, legal autonomy, and economic independence. Yet within those constraints, she fashioned a life that consistently challenged the gendered limits of her era. Although the term feminist would not be coined for decades, Greene’s actions place her firmly within an early American feminist tradition, one defined not by manifestos, but by lived resistance.
As the wife of General Nathanael Greene, Catharine was not a passive companion to history. She was an intellectual partner, a political hostess, and a trusted confidante whose judgment was valued in elite Revolutionary circles. Her education, wit, and confidence allowed her to participate in the world of ideas at a time when women were expected to remain ornamental rather than influential. Like other elite women of the Revolutionary generation, she absorbed the language of liberty and independence, and quietly tested whether those ideals might apply to women as well as men.
Greene’s most radical acts came after widowhood, the brief period in which early American women could regain legal personhood. Rather than retreating into dependence, she managed the Mulberry Grove plantation, engaged deeply with agricultural and mechanical innovation, and played a recognized role in the development and promotion of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. Her participation in technological and economic life directly contradicted prevailing assumptions about women’s intellectual and practical capacities.
Her remarriage to Phineas Miller further underscores her feminist significance. Prior to marriage, Greene secured an agreement that allowed her to retain ownership of the property she had inherited from Nathanael Greene, an explicit refusal of the doctrine of coverture, under which a husband typically assumed control of his wife’s assets. This decision reveals a sophisticated understanding of marriage as a legal and economic institution, and a determination to preserve her autonomy within it. Such arrangements were rare and required both legal acumen and personal authority. Greene entered her second marriage not as a dependent, but as an equal negotiating partner.
Women like Catharine Greene did not call for women’s rights conventions, but they created the conditions that made such movements possible. Alongside contemporaries such as Abigail Adams, Judith Sargent Murray, and Mercy Otis Warren, and alongside free Black women who asserted autonomy under even harsher constraints, Greene helped normalize the idea that women were capable of intellectual judgment, economic stewardship, and independent decision-making. Their lives offered proof, long before formal demands were articulated, that women’s subordination was not natural or inevitable.
Oil on canvas
25 X 34 inches
March 2026
Catharine Littlefield Greene (1755–1814) lived at a moment when American women were formally excluded from political power, legal autonomy, and economic independence. Yet within those constraints, she fashioned a life that consistently challenged the gendered limits of her era. Although the term feminist would not be coined for decades, Greene’s actions place her firmly within an early American feminist tradition, one defined not by manifestos, but by lived resistance.
As the wife of General Nathanael Greene, Catharine was not a passive companion to history. She was an intellectual partner, a political hostess, and a trusted confidante whose judgment was valued in elite Revolutionary circles. Her education, wit, and confidence allowed her to participate in the world of ideas at a time when women were expected to remain ornamental rather than influential. Like other elite women of the Revolutionary generation, she absorbed the language of liberty and independence, and quietly tested whether those ideals might apply to women as well as men.
Greene’s most radical acts came after widowhood, the brief period in which early American women could regain legal personhood. Rather than retreating into dependence, she managed the Mulberry Grove plantation, engaged deeply with agricultural and mechanical innovation, and played a recognized role in the development and promotion of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. Her participation in technological and economic life directly contradicted prevailing assumptions about women’s intellectual and practical capacities.
Her remarriage to Phineas Miller further underscores her feminist significance. Prior to marriage, Greene secured an agreement that allowed her to retain ownership of the property she had inherited from Nathanael Greene, an explicit refusal of the doctrine of coverture, under which a husband typically assumed control of his wife’s assets. This decision reveals a sophisticated understanding of marriage as a legal and economic institution, and a determination to preserve her autonomy within it. Such arrangements were rare and required both legal acumen and personal authority. Greene entered her second marriage not as a dependent, but as an equal negotiating partner.
Women like Catharine Greene did not call for women’s rights conventions, but they created the conditions that made such movements possible. Alongside contemporaries such as Abigail Adams, Judith Sargent Murray, and Mercy Otis Warren, and alongside free Black women who asserted autonomy under even harsher constraints, Greene helped normalize the idea that women were capable of intellectual judgment, economic stewardship, and independent decision-making. Their lives offered proof, long before formal demands were articulated, that women’s subordination was not natural or inevitable.
Champions for ALL People: Karen and Jennifer as Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lillie Chace Wyman
Graphite and Pan Pastel on paper
30 x35 inches
2026
May 2026
Elizabeth Buffum Chace (1806–1899) was one of the most important reformers in Rhode Island during the 19th century. A passionate abolitionist, she and her husband, textile manufacturer Samuel B. Chace, turned their Valley Falls home into a station on the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people escape to freedom. She supported the Free Produce movement, worked with leading anti-slavery activists, and remained committed to abolition throughout her life.
After the Civil War, Elizabeth became a major leader in the women’s suffrage movement, helping found the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association and campaigning tirelessly for women’s political and legal equality. She also became a vocal advocate for labor reform, criticizing the harsh conditions endured by mill workers, especially women and children, and calling for shorter working hours and more humane treatment in factories.
This labor activism created a striking contrast within her own life: the Chace family’s wealth came from the textile industry, and her husband owned multiple mills. Yet Elizabeth used her privileged social position to publicly challenge many of the injustices of industrial labor. Though this tension could have caused division, Samuel Chace appears to have respected and tolerated her reform work, even when it criticized the system that supported the family financially.
Her daughter, Lillie Chace Wyman (1847-1929), carried forward many of her mother’s ideals. Lillie became active in women’s suffrage, labor reform, and peace activism, continuing to advocate for workers and women despite also belonging to a prominent mill-owning family. She was also a published author of five books and numerous articles and essays. Together, Elizabeth and Lillie represent a fascinating historical contradiction: women born into industrial privilege who chose to challenge slavery, inequality, and exploitative labor practices from within their own social world.
Graphite and Pan Pastel on paper
30 x35 inches
2026
May 2026
Elizabeth Buffum Chace (1806–1899) was one of the most important reformers in Rhode Island during the 19th century. A passionate abolitionist, she and her husband, textile manufacturer Samuel B. Chace, turned their Valley Falls home into a station on the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people escape to freedom. She supported the Free Produce movement, worked with leading anti-slavery activists, and remained committed to abolition throughout her life.
After the Civil War, Elizabeth became a major leader in the women’s suffrage movement, helping found the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association and campaigning tirelessly for women’s political and legal equality. She also became a vocal advocate for labor reform, criticizing the harsh conditions endured by mill workers, especially women and children, and calling for shorter working hours and more humane treatment in factories.
This labor activism created a striking contrast within her own life: the Chace family’s wealth came from the textile industry, and her husband owned multiple mills. Yet Elizabeth used her privileged social position to publicly challenge many of the injustices of industrial labor. Though this tension could have caused division, Samuel Chace appears to have respected and tolerated her reform work, even when it criticized the system that supported the family financially.
Her daughter, Lillie Chace Wyman (1847-1929), carried forward many of her mother’s ideals. Lillie became active in women’s suffrage, labor reform, and peace activism, continuing to advocate for workers and women despite also belonging to a prominent mill-owning family. She was also a published author of five books and numerous articles and essays. Together, Elizabeth and Lillie represent a fascinating historical contradiction: women born into industrial privilege who chose to challenge slavery, inequality, and exploitative labor practices from within their own social world.