Freeborn but troubled by poverty most of her life, Nancy Gardner Prince labored as a domestic, seamstress, and when need be, an itinerant jack-of-all-trades to support herself and the causes in which she believed. Respected in her own time as a social activist interested in children's welfare programs and in abolition, Prince is best remembered today as the author of a largely autobiographical travel narrative. By observing and experiencing the social and economic climates of nineteenth-century Russia, the British-controlled West Indies, and several parts of the United States, including the South, Prince came to view racism, sexism, poverty, and political struggle as universal problems and not peculiar to any one country or race of people.

Little is known about Prince apart from the information she provides in A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince, Written by Herself (1850). Born on 15 September 1799 in the seafaring town...