Emergence of a National Black Women’s Club Movement

In 1892, Anna J. Cooper wrote that the Black woman “to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country,” where “she is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both.”^[1]

Across the United States, Black women found themselves largely excluded from White women’s politics and underrepresented in larger conversations about racial politics at the end of the 19th century. Gains from the earlier post-Civil War Reconstruction period began to rapidly shrink. Lynching reached an all-time high in 1892, and Southern states actively disenfranchised Black voters.^[2] As a result, Black women across the country began to organize locally, creating women’s clubs, organizations, and publications. Through this coalition-building, these women created a structure in which they could play a more active role in women’s and racial politics.

Women’s clubs emerged in different areas of the country. For example, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin created the Women’s Era Club and Women’s Era newspaper out of Boston, and in Alabama, Margaret Murray Washington started “Mother’s Meetings” before establishing the Tuskegee Women’s Club. From small localized clubs to ones with large membership like the Colored Women’s League in Washington D.C., women gathered across the country and addressed issues not limited to politics. The clubs supported Black women’s roles in their homes and greater society.^[3]

Establishing a National Organization

Following an insidious letter attacking Black women by a journalist, Ruffin decided to organize a conference to bring together the disparate women’s clubs across the country for the First National Conference of Colored Women of America. Ruffin and others recognized the need to organize on a national scale. She affirmed:

Boston has been selected as a meeting place because it has seemed to be the general opinion that here, and here only, can be found the atmosphere which would best interpret and represent us, our position, our needs and our aims.^[4]

The atmosphere in Boston—the North—appeared more inviting to a growing nationalist movement of Black clubwomen with ranging ideologies. Violence and hostility in the South created complexities within the national movement for equality. As scholar Mark R. Schneider described, many turned towards political strategies of “self-help and economic advancement.”^[5] Yet, despite differences of class, gender, and identity, the women at the 1895 Conference held sessions that entertained both conservative and radical approaches.

Held in late July, the conference embraced diverse avenues of advocacy, “with its sessions on temperance, social purity, and moral elevation,” where many, Schneider explained, “embraced conservative economic values, Black self-help and institution-building” alongside “integration, defense of the ballot, and opposition to lynching.”^[6] Women at the convention blurred the stricter lines of ideology found in national, male-dominated racial politics.

Charles Street Meeting House, where Black clubwomen held the last day of the 1895 Conference

Boston Public Library

On the final day of the conference, attendees established the National Federation of Afro-American Women, selecting Margaret Murray Washington as its first president. The Women’s Era reported:

[T]his choice will go further than anything else in uniting the intelligent women of the North and South. It will cement the friendly feelings already existing. It will be the means of building up in the South large clubs for culture and race work such as already exist in the North.^[7]

The Conference and creation of the National Federation of Afro-American Women sparked a national movement and created unity amongst Black clubwomen from all regions of the country.

Growing Divides: Politics of Respectability vs. Political Activism

Despite the success of the 1895 Convention in creating the National Federation of Afro-American Women, Black women soon faced their own ideological divides. Some members, such as Fannie Barrier Williams and Mary Church Terrell, supported racial uplift as a means to progress. Racial uplift went hand in hand with respectability politics, or politics adhering to the behaviors deemed acceptable by dominant society. As a result, many educated and elite Black women at the time viewed respectable public behavior as the path towards racial progress. As historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham described, some believed passing down behaviors tied to “temperance, industriousness, thrift, refined manners, and Victorian sexual morals,” to Black individuals of all classes would then help uplift the entirety of the race.^[8]

Others preferred a direct approach through radical activism. Women such as Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Ida B. Wells-Barnett held more militant views. They organized anti-lynching meetings and staunchly opposed segregation. Whereas those less inclined to agitation embodied the politics of respectability.

The tensions between agitation and accommodation manifested a new conflict regarding the second meeting of Black clubwomen at the National Colored Women’s Congress later that fall. While the women of the NAAFW were invited to the Congress, not all attended. Ruffin, in opposition to the segregationist practices of the organizers of the Cotton States and International Exposition, refused to attend. However, those such as Margaret Murray Washington, Victoria Earle Matthews, and Fannie Barrier Williams attended. They began to push the NAAFW more towards respectability and moral uplift.

"Lifting As We Climb" pin owned by Mary Church Terrell

Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Ray and Jean Langston in memory of Mary Church and Robert Terrell

In 1896, the Colored Women’s League of Washington D.C. finally merged with the National Federation of Afro-American Women. Combined, the two organizations formed to create the National Association of Colored Women, with Mary Church Terrell as its first president. This new organization outwardly promoted racial uplift and self-improvement. The NACW’s motto—“Lifting as we climb”—emphasized a shift away from radical activism towards “ideals of self-help and service.”^[9]

While those who supported radical activism, like Ruffin, did participate in this new national organization moving in a different direction, they decided to step back from leadership. However, as the NACW grew more conservative, Ruffin continued to advocate for radical social change. Following the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, Ruffin called for direct action against injustice:

If laws are unjust, they must be continually broken until they are killed or altered. The world is turning a callous ear to appeals for justice; it is evident that the only way now to get what we want is to take it even if we have to break laws in getting it.^[10]

Others such as Margaret Murray Washington, less vocal about laws like segregation, worked to improve the conditions of Black individuals in these spaces. For example, Washington and Southern women’s clubs helped improve the conditions of segregated public spaces.^[11] While Ruffin engaged in similar community work, she continued to speak outwardly and radically against laws about segregation. She felt direct action—such as protest and breaking unjust laws—needed to be used in order to combat discrimination and racial injustice.

Despite ideological differences amongst leadership, Black clubwomen continued their critical work towards racial justice at the turn of the new century. In doing so, Black women across the nation shaped a new era – one with a diversity of possibilities.

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Footnotes

[1] Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, 1892, 134, Archive.org.

[2] Mark R. Schneider, Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 1890-1920, (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), Archive.org.

[3] Jacqueline Anne Rouse, “Out of the Shadow of Tuskegee: Margaret Murray Washington, Social Activism, and Race Vindication.” The Journal of Negro History 81, no. 1/4 (1996): 31–46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2717606; Teresa Blue Holden, "'Earnest Women Can Do Anything': The Public Career of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, 1842-1904," A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Saint Louis University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 2005.

[4] Mark R. Schneider, 97.

[5] Mark R. Schneider, 54.

[6] Mark R. Schneider, 99.

[7] The Women’s Era, Volume 2, No. 5, August, 1895.

[8] Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920, (Harvard University Press, 1994) Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880 ... - Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham - Google Books.

[9] Paisley Jane Harris, "Gatekeeping and Remaking: The Politics of Respectability in African American Women's History and Black Feminism," Journal of Women's History 15, no. 1 (2003): 212-220. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2003.0025.

[10] Teresa Blue Holden, "'Earnest Women Can Do Anything': The Public Career of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, 1842-1904," 196.

[11] Jacqueline Anne Rouse, “Out of the Shadow of Tuskegee: Margaret Murray Washington, Social Activism, and Race Vindication.”