Maria Stewart spoke first
Did you know that the first American woman to speak for equal rights in public, in front of men, was a Black woman? And that she made sure her speeches were published and circulated? When? More than 15 years before Seneca Falls. Who? 👇🧵<br /><br />Maria W. Stewart gave her first public lecture in Boston in 1832. She explained her unexpected female presence, but didn’t apologize for it. She quoted Hebrew Bible and New Testament fluently, especially prophetic texts like Jeremiah and Ezekiel. <br /><br />She addressed the shared fate of enslaved people and free People of Color like her, and advocated a multi-pronged strategy for resisting white supremacy: sue for your rights, boycott white businesses, and do not discount the threat of violence. <br /><br />In the 1830s, many abolitionists thought “colonization†-exile to Africa- would follow slavery. Maria rejected that: “Now that we have enriched their soil and filled their coffers...they would drive us to a strange land. But before I go, the bayonet shall pierce me through.†<br /><br />Her speeches were published because she marched into the small office of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison & Isaac Knapp’s fledgling newspaper, and told them they should publish her writing. So many later women’s words were lost, but Maria Stewart made sure hers were not. <br /><br />We don’t have an image of young Maria Stewart, but she was described as very beautiful. She was orphaned at 5 and indentured until 15 in the home of a minister. She found brief happiness in her marriage to James Stewart, but he died three years after their wedding. <br /><br />Her husband left her what should have been a comfortable inheritance but it was denied her. The injustices, though typical for the widow of a Black man with property, affronted even the Massachusetts court. “For several years,†Stewart wrote, “my heart was in continual sorrow.†<br /><br />What made her so bold, so unusual? No woman had sought to speak in public, on politics. Religious conviction was the source of her confidence. She underwent a religious conversion after her husband’s died - and God compelled her to deliver a divinely inspired message of justice. <br /><br />"Who shall go forward, and take off the reproach that is cast upon the people of color?" asked a voice from within, "Shall it be a woman?" And my heart made this reply--"If it is thy will, be it even so, Lord Jesus!" <br /><br />She persevered for two years before relentless criticism pushed her to give up public speaking. She remained an activist, a teacher, and a devout Christian. She also worked constantly, ultimately as the matron - head of housekeeping - at the Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington. <br /><br />In 1879 she came into a bit of money - her late husband’s pension from the War of 1812. She used it to underwrite publication of a second edition of her speeches, Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart. <br /><br />#suffrage100 #vanguard #BlackSuffragists <br /><br />Adding her contemporary editor, Marilyn Richardson, @MarilynElaine - read Maria's writing and Richardson's wonderful essays for context, interpretation, and biographical detail.
Daily Suffragist
Original thread
Sept 21, 2020
Anna Howard Shaw: Reverend, Doctor, NAWSA Leader
When Anna Howard Shaw was a young woman, she wore pants and short hair. She gave it up eventually because she got too many comments, but she couldn’t hide her ambition, and her certainty she could do better than a man. <br /><br />Turn-of-the-century thread. <br /><br />She came from iconoclasts: her mother’s British family were Unitarians in a world where everyone was an Anglican. “Anna’s grandmother stood by each year while some of her furniture was taken to be sold for the Church of England tithes which she refused to pay.” (Flexner) <br /><br />If religious nonconformity is inherited, maybe Anna got it from her grandmother. Anna heard Rev. Marianna Thompson preach in rural Michigan, and by 1871 she was licensed to preach in the Methodist church. Her family was angry she left Unitarianism (which didn't ordain women yet). <br /><br />They offered to pay her way to the University of Michigan if she’d give up the ministry. She declined. <br /><br />Anna struggled, hungry, through 2 years of divinity school at @<a href="https://twitter.com/BUTheology" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">BUTheology</a> - she was denied the financial aid men got. She applied for full ordination in the Methodist Episcopal Church; when she appealed that rejection they revoked her preacher’s license. She was ordained, grudgingly, in the Methodist Protestant Church. <br /><br />She quit the ministry after 7 years. It was too hard “to fight the church in addition to the devil.” <br /><br />Also, she was intellectually restless and wanted a new challenge. In 1883 she went back to Boston University @<a href="https://twitter.com/BU_Tweets" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">BU_Tweets</a> this time to @<a href="https://twitter.com/BUmedical" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">BUMedical</a>. <br /><br />She got her MD in 1886 and was known as Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw for the rest of her life. <br /><br />She was a protege of Susan B Anthony’s, who recruited her for her preaching skill. The movement needed orators. <br /><br />Susan B sent Anna Shaw to California to lead the heartbreaking 1896 referendum fight. With a train pass provided by the widow of the Southern Pacific Railroad she traveled the state, lecturing daily. Her letters to her lover Lucy Anthony, Susan B’s niece, describe the travails of that and so many other state campaigns. <br /><br />Shaw vied with Carrie Chapman Catt to succeed Susan B as head of NAWSA. Eventually Shaw got the job - and was a disaster. <br /><br />The movement needed leadership, not just great speeches, to fill the void left by Stanton & Anthony. In Eleanor Flexner’s words: “Dr. Shaw’s devotion was complete and her gifts were many, but administrative ability was not among them.” <br /><br />Under Shaw’s leadership, NAWSA descended into ever-more explicitly racist policies. In 1903, Black women were barred from attending the annual convention in New Orleans. (Adella Hunt Logan snuck in and reported back.) <br /><br />NAWSA had sunk to endorsing a states’ rights approach to voting, Jim Crow and all. In New Orleans, Rev. Shaw said, “Never before in the history of the world have men made former slaves the political masters of their former mistresses.” <br /><br />She kept company with women who shared her views. <br /><br />Eleanor Flexner was graciously vague about the lesbian sisterhood to which she belonged. “In 1903 Anna Shaw built a home at Moylan, Pa., which she and Lucy Anthony shared until her death. Other friends included many of the leading women reformers of her day. President M. Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr College was a close associate in later years.” <br /><br />Carey Thomas was a big ol’ dyke, and also a racist and an anti-Semite. These things aren’t mutually exclusive. <br /><br />Ironically, the United Methodist Church announced this year that it is divorcing itself - splitting in half as the only way to resolve longstanding conflict over LGBTQ clergy. Yet we have always been present, since 1880 at least. <br /><br />After Anna’s death, Lucy Anthony commissioned a stained glass window in her honor for the Methodist Protestant Church in Tarrytown, NY. <br /><br />The image is of the Annunciation, and the inscription reads: “Commemorating the brave, strong stand of this church in ordaining Anna Howard Shaw, whom other churches persistently refused to ordain.” <br /><br />The window now resides in the stairwell at BU Theology School where Anna once collapsed from hunger on her way to class. Nearby is the Anna Howard Shaw Center for women in ministry. #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1252779160692498437" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
21/04/2020
Death and taxes
Was suffrage a legitimate charitable cause? "501c3" refers to a section of the tax code. Tax exempt status for voluntary, religious & educational orgs took its current form between 1894-1913. But before that, trusts & estates law was where the question was argued. Thread. <br /><br />In 1861, a Boston abolitionist named Francis Jackson bequeathed $5,000 to Susan B Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Wendell Phillips, “in trust...to secure the passage of laws granting women, whether married or unmarried, the right to vote, to hold office...to hold, manage and devise property, and all other civil rights enjoyed by men. My desire is that they may become a permanent organization, until the rights of women shall be established equal with those of men.” <br /><br />A Massachusetts court invalidated the gift. <br /><br />The court noted that it had no comment on whether the stated goals were wise or desirable. But accomplishing them would require changing the law - the Constitution, even! It held that overthrowing or changing laws is not a charitable use. <br /><br />The movement got the money anyway. Francis Jackson anticipated this would happen, and had given the $5,000 to Wendell Phillips while alive. Plenty of abolitionists didn’t care much about women’s rights. So why did Jackson? <br /><br />Sally Roesch Wagner @<a href="https://twitter.com/Swagner711" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Swagner711</a> explains that watching his daughter suffer awakened him to the injustice women faced. His daughter Eliza lost custody of her young children when her husband absconded with them. In 1850s Boston, she was powerless. <br /><br />When Eliza herself died more than 20 years later, she left $50,000 to the movement. Just as her father had, she divided the funds between Lucy Stone and Susan B Anthony - now the leaders of two separate suffrage associations. <br /><br />Susan B Anthony, an unmarried woman, could inherit outright. For a married woman the will had to be more specific: “to Lucy Stone, wife of Henry B. Blackwell, as her own absolute separate property, free from any control by him.” <br /><br />Disappointed relatives challenged the will, arguing that Eliza was trying to do just what her father’s will couldn’t: create an unlawful charity. But Wendell Phillips - to whom Francis Jackson entrusted the original $5,000 gift - had written the will himself. <br /><br />The highest court in Massachusetts - 7 men, including Oliver Wendell Holmes - held in 1885 that Eliza's will was airtight. Lucy Stone and Susan B each got almost $25,000. Even after legal fees, it was the largest gift a woman had yet given to the cause. #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1240845638620909574" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
19/03/2020
<a href="https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/admin/items/show/327" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Eliza Jackson Eddy's $50,000 Bequest</a>
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, part II
I am particularly fond of Josephine St Pierre Ruffin because she was an avid defender of Ida B Wells. Josephine moved among society women both white and Black and wasn’t afraid to disagree with them, especially in defense of unpopular or uncomfortable ideas. Thread. <br /><br />Ida B. Wells was often the source of those unpopular ideas. Josephine was already a prominent publisher when she heard Ida speak in front of 400 New Yorkers. The 1892 speech launched Ida’s anti-lynching campaign and galvanized Af-Am women to become more explicitly political. A Memphis newspaper, furious that Ida was exposing lynchings, called her a “wench” and a “black harlot.” Nasty still, in 1892 those words were calculated to exploit stereotypes Black women faced constantly, and to undermine Ida’s credibility within the Black community. <br /><br />Josephine wasn’t having it. She defended Ida unconditionally, and made clear that the Woman’s Era Club of Boston believed in Ida Wells’ “purity of purpose and character.” She defended her again when Ida picked a fight with a very powerful woman. Ida pointed out that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union wasn’t doing much to fight lynching. (They weren’t - they believed the lie that lynchings punished Black men for raping white women.) In criticizing WCTU, she took on Frances Willard, its powerful leader. Wealthy British supporters of American reform were devoted to Willard, and insisted Ida was lying. Even Frederick Douglass defended the powerful Willard, but Josephine sided with Ida. <br /><br />“Doubtless Miss Willard is a good friend to colored people,” said Josephine’s paper, “...but we have failed to hear from her and the WCTU any flat-footed denunciation of lynching and lynchers.” <a href="http://womenwriters.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/advocacy/content.php?level=div&id=era2_04.15.02&document=era2" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Read the whole editorial here:</a><br /><br />Josephine stood by Ida in internal battles among the clubwomen through the years, and against Booker T. Washington. I don’t think they were close friends. I like to imagine she was loyal because Ida stood for the brutal truth, and Josephine respected that. #BlackSuffragists
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1233232168652070912" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
27/02/2020
Founding of the NACW
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">In 1893, inspired by Ida B Wells' call to do something to fight lynching, Josephine St Pierre Ruffin founded the Woman's Era Club in Boston. </span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Two years later she invited dozens of other Black women's clubs that had sprung up around the country to gather for a 3-day meeting. </span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">The result was a watershed: in July 1895, the National Conference of Colored Women united 36 clubs in 12 states. Mary Church Terrell simultaneously organized the National League of Colored Women in DC. By 1896 they had merged to create the National Association of Colored Women. </span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">30+ years after emancipation, NACW was an idea whose time had come. It quickly grew to represent 50,000 women in more than 1,000 clubs. </span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">(For the record, IdaBWells thought it should have been "Afro-American" instead of "Colored.") </span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">NACW was unique, Paula Giddings explains, for being independent: not a women's auxiliary of a Black men's group nor a minority chapter of a white women's group. </span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">@<a href="https://twitter.com/marthasjones_"><span class="s2">MarthaSJones_</span></a> describes the clubs as "spaces that encouraged black women's leadership, independent thought and activism." </span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">They were also crucibles for voter engagement. In Chicago, for example, women won the right to vote for school board in 1891. The Great Migration had begun & the Black population of Chicago was skyrocketing. "As black men in the South were being turned away from polling places, black women in the North were gearing up to vote." @marthasjones_ </span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">In women's clubs and church groups, black women were "rallying, marching, vetting candidates, electioneering, voting, and even running for local office."</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Where Black women could vote in the 1890s, they voted Republican. (The slightly-less-racist party at the time.) </span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">As Prof. Jones said recently @<a href="https://twitter.com/bwln_nyu"><span class="s2">bwln_nyu</span></a>, "One group of women in America has voted as a block from the beginning - Black women." #BlackSuffragists #Suffrage100</span></p>
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1232801115231703041" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
26/2/2020
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin was an incredible organizer of women. In 1879 she started the Boston Kansas Relief Assoc. to raise money to support Exodusters - the first African-Americans to leave the South en masse. <br /><br />She helped Lucy Stone & Julia Ward Howe found the American Woman Suffrage Assoc in Boston, after the split with Stanton & Anthony. She was a charter member of the Massachusetts School Suffrage Assoc, organizing women to use their first small opportunity to vote in school board elections. <br /><br />Josephine was born in Boston & educated in Salem b/c her parents refused to send her to Boston’s segregated schools. <br /><br />She was 16 when she married George Ruffin. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1869 (!) & became Boston’s 1st Black judge. As a member of the state legislature, he supported woman suffrage. <br /><br />After George died, Josephine expanded her career as an editor and publisher. She wrote for the Courant, a Black weekly, and was an active member of the New England Women’s Press Assoc, which she helped integrate. <br /><br />In 1890 she and her daughter Florida started The Woman’s Era. <br /><br />The Woman's Era was the first newspaper by and for African-American women. Josephine was editor & publisher. <br /><br />In 1894 they expanded to national distribution, creating a crucial mouthpiece for the women's club movement Josephine was helping to launch. <br /><br />Tomorrow: the movement.
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1232529386395643904">Original thread.</a>
25/02/2020
Julia Ward Howe
So many great suffragists were born for the struggle. They were iconoclasts, rebels from the beginning. Many remained unmarried, or married unusual men who respected them. Not Julia Ward Howe. 🧵<br /><br />She was born wealthy, raised privileged, and nicely educated for a girl of 1830s New York City. She married “well,†to a Bostonian 19 years her senior. They honeymooned in Rome, and soon had their first of six children. They hated each other. <br /><br />He was busy & accomplished - he ran the Perkins Institute for the Blind and was involved in school and prison reform, aid work, and abolitionism. None of this made Samuel Gridley Howe a feminist. He opposed Julia having any public life. She contemplated divorce, but incompatibility was not grounds for divorce in the 1850s. <br /><br />Julia never fit in in Boston. Her restlessness, disinterest in domesticity, and sharp wit were all wrong there. She became a poet & a playwright - to her husband’s humiliation. Her plays were full of violent love, betrayal and suicide. They were literally banned in Boston. <br /><br />Reviewing 20 years of marriage, Ward Howe wrote in her journal: “In the course of that time I have never known my husband to approve of any act of mine which I myself valued.†<br /><br />Suffrage saved her. After the Civil War she fell in with Lucy Stone and the New England suffragists who became the American Woman Suffrage Association. They were the pro-15th Amendment faction, and eventually became the more respectable, conservative wing of the movement. <br /><br />She wasn’t an experienced activist like Lucy Stone or ElizCadyStanton or SusanB Anthony, all of whom had been organizing and lecturing on abolitionism & feminism for decades. But Stone was happy to have a prominent woman join the ranks--and Julia finally found a place she fit in. <br /><br />Julia spent more than 30 years campaigning for suffrage, traveling and lecturing. She continued to write poetry. Her husband died in 1876; Julia lived decades more. She was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts & Letters, in 1908. <br /><br />About that song… <br /><br />The Atlantic Monthly published Julia Ward Howe’s poem “Battle Hymn of the Republic.†It wasn’t her first published poem, and didn’t attract much attention until it was set to the tune of “John Brown’s Body†and became a hit in the North. <br /><br />Legend has it that President Lincoln wept when he heard it. If you're already singing “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…†watch<br />@JonBatiste's version.<br /><br /><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/hkCUdiP2Qsc" frameborder="0"></iframe><br /><br />I hope Julia Ward Howe would enjoy.<br /><br />#suffrage100 #19thAmendment #15thAmendment
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1224557768742461446" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
October 17, 2020 (and originally 03/02/2020)
Josphine St. Pierre Ruffin joins the American
Black Boston in the 1870s was thriving. In Massachusetts, unlike NY & PA, Black men voted before the war. After, 6 Af-Am men served in the state legislature (and all supported woman suffrage). One, George Ruffin, Harvard Law Class of 1869, married Josephine St. Pierre. <br /><br />Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin accomplished so much; you’ll hear more about her in months to come. Born in Boston in 1842, she was described by those who knew her as imposing and self-assured: “She always had the lead in the play.”<br /><br />In 1875 she joined the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Assoc., noting later how AWSA leaders Lucy Stone & Julia Ward Howe had welcomed her. It was one of many organizations she led and integrated, as an upper-class Black woman using her privilege to organize and advance other women.
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1195551382947926017" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
15/11/2019
Sarah Remond & mother
Nancy Lenox & Sarah Parker Remond were mother/daughter free Black women & leading abolitionists. Sarah 👇 traveled & lectured on the sexual abuse of enslaved women. In 1853 she sued & won $500 after being ejected from a Boston opera house. #Suffrage100 #motherdaughter #MeToo
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1171597226084392960" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
11/09/2019