The Wonder of Emma Chambers Maitland
By Abigail Sullivan
"From now on, I’m to be what I’m to be," said Emma Chambers Maitland" (Waring, Welcome to the Trail, Emma Maitland). This one quote had the power to change the lives of many women. "Without letting fear and stereotypes hold her back, [Emma] built a dynamic, richly varied, and colorful life for herself, a life packed with achievement and adventure, one that any modern woman would be glad to embrace" (Waring, Welcome to the Trail, Emma Maitland). When Emma had wanted to go to a convent to study, she did. When Emma decided that she wanted to box after participating in a boxing skit, she did. After long days of training, Emma had been the first African-American woman to enter the boxing world and win the Golden Gloves.
Emma Chambers Maitland, was originally named Jane Maitland but later on changed her name to a more well known name: Emma Chambers Maitland. Born in the late 1800's, Emma had been raised on a farm harvesting tobacco. She and her family were sharecroppers. A sharecropper arrangement is when instead of paying rent in money, the individual pays in crops. After recovering from falling out of a tree, Emma had called a local priest who supported the idea of her being educated. At first her father was reluctant to let her go to school, but she was persistent. In the end Emma was allowed to go to the priest convent to study.
When Emma returned from the convent her mother had fallen ill. Against her family's wishes, Emma took a qualification test to become a teacher. When she passed the qualification test, she declared to her family, "I am through killing tobacco worms" (Waring, Welcome to the Trail, Emma Maitland). With those six words, she became a teacher. After three years of teaching, Emma began to get bored with the life she was leading. So, Emma decided to leave her comfortable life in Virginia, and live in Washington D.C., to look for better job opportunities.
While in Washington D.C., she met Clarence Maitland, a medical student at Howard University. The two fell in love instantly and got married a short time later. Emma gave birth to a beautiful daughter. Just when Emma had thought everything was going her way, disaster struck. In the first year of their marriage, Clarence died from a severe case of tuberculosis. "'Within one year, I was a fiancée, a wife, a mother, and a widow,' reflected Emma Maitland in her journal" (Waring, Welcome to the Trail, Emma Maitland). Leaving Washington D.C. with devastation in her wake, she and her baby daughter fled to Paris, like many African-Americans did at the time.
When Emma was in Paris, she obtained a job as a dancer at the Moulin Rouge, but then later teamed up with another performer to perform a boxing skit. Although the boxing skits started out as stage attractions, Emma began to take boxing seriously. She started training, competing, winning, and was eventually named the world’s lightweight female boxing champion.
After, Emma Maitland's retirement from boxing, she continued to write and taught dancing and gymnastics. Emma lived an adventurous life, full of many different stories; from a sharecropping family, to a teacher; from a teacher, to a dancer; from a dancer, to a boxer. Sadly, all great stories have to come to an end. When Emma Chambers Maitland died in 1975 at age 82, she had died a happy and strong women.