Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  ... black women both shape the world and are shaped by it.... [they] create their own black feminist theory. They come to feminist theory and practice out of the oppression they experience as people who are poor and black and women.... black feminism has evolved historically over centuries, outside traditional white feminine roles, white social institutions, and white feminist cultural theory.

  —KESHO YVONNE SCOTT, The Habit of Surviving

  The struggle for black women’s liberation that began to emerge in the mid-1960s is a continuation of both intellectual and activist traditions whose seeds were sown during slavery and flowered during the antislavery fervor of the 1830s. When a small group of free black “feminist-abolitionists” in the North surfaced during the early nineteenth century, among whom were Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and Frances E. W. Harper, the history of African American feminism began.1 Their involvement in abolitionist and other reform movements as lecturers, writers, and journalists —traditionally male domains—met with resistance and violated the Victorian ethic of “true womanhood,” which stressed piety, chastity, submissiveness, and domesticity (Welter, 151).a

  The argument that African American women confront both a “woman question and a race problem” (Cooper, 134) captures the essence of black feminist thought in the nineteenth century and would reverberate among intellectuals, journalists, activists, writers, educators, artists, and community leaders, both male and female, for generations. While feminist perspectives have been a persistent and important component of the African American literary and intellectual traditions for generations, scholars have focused primarily on its racial overtones.2 This tendency to ignore long years of political struggle aimed at eradicating the multiple oppressions that black women experience resulted in erroneous notions about the relevance of feminism to the black community during the second wave of the women’s movement. Rewriting black history using gender as one category of analysis should render obsolete the notion that feminist thinking is alien to African American women or that they have been misguided imitators of white women. An analysis of the feminist activism of black women also suggests the necessity of reconceptualizing women’s issues to include poverty, racism, imperialism, lynching, welfare, economic exploitation, sterilization abuse, decent housing, and a host of other concerns that generations of black women foregrounded.

  While black feminism is not a monolithic, static ideology, and there is considerable diversity among African American feminists, certain premises are constant: 1) Black women experience a special kind of oppression and suffering in this country which is racist, sexist, and classist because of their dual racial and gender identity and their limited access to economic resources; 2) This “triple jeopardy” has meant that the problems, concerns, and needs of black women are different in many ways from those of both white women and black men; 3) Black women must struggle for black liberation and gender equality simultaneously; 4) There is no inherent contradiction in the struggle to eradicate sexism and racism as well as the other “isms” which plague the human community, such as classism and heterosexism; 5) Black women’s commitment to the liberation of blacks and women is profoundly rooted in their lived experience.

  Discussions about the evolution of feminist consciousness3 among African American women usually begin with abolitionist Sojourner Truth (less often with abolitionist Maria Stewart), since the catalyst for the emergence of women’s rights in the mid-nineteenth century was the movement to eradicate slavery. There is certainly little disagreement among historians about the link between women’s rights and abolition: “It was in the abolition movement that women first learned to organize, to hold public meetings, to conduct petition campaigns. For a quarter of a century the two movements, to free the slave and liberate the woman, nourished and strengthened one another” (Flexner, 41).

  It was the horrendous circumstances that enslaved African women endured since 1619, not the abolition movement, that inspired their first yearnings for freedom and rebellious spirit. They resisted beatings, involuntary breeding, sexual exploitation by white masters, family separation, debilitating work schedules, bad living conditions, and even bringing into the world children who would be slaves. A few of their life stories called attention to the peculiar plight of black women and their strategies for resistance.4In her antebellum autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861), Harriet Jacobs publicized her sexual vulnerability and stated unequivocally that “slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own” (Yellin, 77). Covert use of contraceptives, the practice of abortion, and desperate attempts to control the fate of their children, including occasionally infanticide, provided some slave women a measure of control over their bodies and their reproductive capacity. The most well-documented case of infanticide concerns Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky in 1856, and during her capture in Cincinnati killed her baby daughter rather than have her returned to her master. This saga inspired Toni Morrison’s award-winning novel, Beloved, which was published in 1987.

  Manifestations of black women’s race and gender consciousness are also found in the single-sex, self-help organizations which free Northern black women formed in the early 1800s because it was difficult for them to become leaders in organizations with black men, or because they were denied membership in white women’s groups. It was also easier for black women to attend to their own political, cultural, and intellectual agendas with the establishment of separate literary, debating, abolitionist, or other reform organizations. Located primarily in the northeast, one of the earliest of these organizations was the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of Boston, founded in 1831. In 1832, free women of color were also responsible for organizing the first female abolitionist group, the Salem Massachusetts Female Antislavery Society, a year before the founding in Philadelphia of the all-male American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS), the most prominent abolitionist organization. The racially mixed Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, also founded in 1833, emerged because the AAS prohibited female membership. Though ignored by historians attempting to document the development of feminism in the mid-nineteenth century, black women’s self-help, abolitionist, and other reform activities also contributed to a climate of discontent which foreshadowed the historic women’s rights gathering at Seneca Falls in 1848.

  In 1832, Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879), a free black from Connecticut with abolitionist and feminist impulses, delivered four public lectures in Boston, the first one before the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society. She was probably the first black woman to speak publicly in defense of women’s rights, though she is remembered primarily as the first Americanborn woman of any race to lecture publicly about political matters to racially mixed audiences of women and men. Though she spoke on a variety of issues relevant to the black community—literacy, abolition, economic empowerment, and racial unity—she admonished black women in particular to break free from stifling gender definitions and reach their fullest potential by pursuing formal education and careers, especially teaching, outside the home. She was also adamant that black women assume leadership roles. These were all familiar themes in what we now label a black feminist agenda during the nineteenth century. Passionate in her defense of black womanhood, she queried: “How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles? ... Possess the spirit of independence.... Sue for your rights and privileges” (Richardson, 38).

  Discouraged by criticism from black men about her inappropriate female behavior (political activism and lecturing in public), Stewart left the lecture circuit a year later in 1833, but not without defending womanhood in the most glowing terms by alluding to historical and biblical precedents of women leaders and scholars. She also warned against a paradoxical problem which would plague the black community for generations—pre
aching against prejudice in the white community but being discriminatory in its own backyard.

  During the 1830s and 1840s, other American women, like Stewart, began lecturing against slavery and discovered that they had to defend their right to speak in public, which motivated them to demand their own emancipation. In 1840, the mostly white male American delegates to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention arrived in London to find the women delegates among them excluded from participation. While seated in the gallery behind a curtain with the rest of the women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott felt the striking similarity between themselves, as white women, and black slaves, a common theme in early white feminist discourse. During ten frustrating days, they became friends and agreed to hold a women’s right convention on their return to America. Eight years later, the Seneca Falls convention, most of whose participants were white female abolitionists, was held in New York; this convention signaled the beginning of the United States women’s movement. Frederick Douglass, prominent abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, was the lone black in attendance.

  While Frederick Douglass believed the antislavery movement was helping to empower women, he understood the need for an independent, organized movement to achieve equal rights for women. On July 14, 1848, his North Star carried the announcement of the Seneca Falls Convention. A constant reminder to readers of his commitment to the rights of women was the newspaper’s slogan—“Right is of No Sex.” At Seneca Falls, when it appeared that Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s resolution for woman suffrage was headed for defeat, Douglass at a critical juncture asked for the floor and delivered an eloquent plea on behalf of women’s suffrage. The resolution was then put to vote and carried by a small margin.

  Serious involvement on the part of black women in the “first-wave” women’s rights movement is manifest in the life of Sojourner Truth, the most revered black feminist-abolitionist. Though she could neither read nor write, we know of the details of her life because she dictated her autobiography to a friend. Truth, whose slave name was Isabella, was born around 1773, having been brought as a child with her parents from Africa and sold as a slave in the state of New York. At age nine, she was sold away from her parents to John Nealy for $100 and sold twice more before she was twelve years old. Her last master, John Dumont, raped her, and later married her to an older slave, Thomas, by whom she had several children. Although slavery was ended by law in New York in 1817, her master delayed her emancipation; she was finally freed by another master in 1827. For a number of years she worked in New York City as a domestic, the major source of work for black women in the North during this period. Feeling called by God, she left New York in 1843, abandoned her slave name, Isabella, became an itinerant preacher, and attended many antislavery gatherings.

  In 1850, she attended the second women’s right convention in Salem, Ohio (as did Douglass), and spoke at the third women’s rights convention, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her legendary, but now controversial, “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, delivered at the Akron, Ohio, women’s rights convention in 1851, is an eloquent statement of black feminist thought because of the implicit links it makes between race and gender in the lives of black women. Truth also reminds her audience that poor black women, whose experiences are radically different from those of white women, must be considered in notions about womanhood.5

  In 1866, following the Civil War, Douglass and Charles Remond were among the vice presidents chosen for the newly formed Equal Rights Association (ERA) after the American Anti-Slavery Society disbanded. Later in the year at an Albany meeting, Douglass warned the ERA that it was in danger of becoming a women’s right association only. At the first annual meeting of the ERA in 1867, Sojourner Truth addressed women’s rights again, but worried that the freedom of black men was getting more attention than black women’s liberation. Two years later, a major split occurred in the women’s movement over woman suffrage. At the proceedings of the ERA meeting in New York in 1869, the famous debate between Frederick Douglas and white feminists occurred during which he argued for the greater urgency of race over gender. He believed it was the Negro’s hour, and women’s rights could wait since linking woman suffrage to Negro suffrage at this point would seriously reduce the chances of securing the ballot for black men, and for black (males), Douglass reiterated, the ballot was urgent. When asked whether this was true for black women as well, he quickly responded, “Yes, yes, yes . . . but not because she is a woman, but because she is black (Foner, 87).” Frances E. W. Harper, a prominent black feminist-abolitionist, supported Douglass, while Sojourner Truth supported white suffragists, believing that if black men got the vote they would dominate black women.

  Following this meeting, Stanton and Anthony organized the womenonly National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) because they believed male leaders had betrayed their interests. In 1869 in Cleveland, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) was organized with Lucy Stone as chair. By the fall of 1873, even though the Fifteenth Amendment granted black male suffrage and excluded women from voting, white women were anxious to reconcile their differences with Douglass. Peace was finally restored with black abolitionists at the 1876 convention of NWSA, during which Douglass was told that he was needed in the continuing struggle for women’s rights. Though he was still somewhat bitter about the racism which surfaced during the battle over the Fifteenth Amendment, he announced that he was willing to work for women’s emancipation and became a familiar figure at women’s rights conventions again.

  An examination of the extraordinary saga of black women journalists during this period provides another perspective on their feminist vision. Mary Shadd Cary (1823–1893), born in Delaware to abolitionist parents, was the first black female newspaper editor in North America. Her pioneering publishing efforts in the 1850s mark the beginning of black women’s leadership roles in the male-dominated field of journalism. She migrated to Canada with her brother after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 and a year later solicited the help of Samuel Ringgold Ward, abolitionist and fugitive slave, in the founding of their own abolitionist newspaper, the Provincial Freeman, which would also be a publishing outlet for other black women whom she encouraged to write. Its motto was “Self-Reliance Is the True Road to Independence” which was consistent with her ideas about black female empowerment.

  After the death of her husband, she returned to the United States in 1863, started a school for black children in Washington, D.C., and joined the antislavery lecture circuit. She also became the first black woman lawyer in the United States, graduating from Howard Law School in 1870. In 1880, she founded the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise Association in Washington, D.C., one of the earliest women’s rights organizations for African American women. Though gaining suffrage for black women was the major objective, the Association’s twenty-point agenda included broadening occupations for black women and establishing newspapers that black women would control.

  The black women’s club movement, which emerged on the national level in the 1890s as did white women’s clubs, must be reconceptualized as a manifestation of middle-class black women’s race and gender obligations, though scholars locate it primarily within the context of self-help and racial uplift. During the 1870s, middle-class white women, freed from the drudgery of housework because of advances in technology, the availability of immigrant domestics, and access to education and leisure, organized clubs for themselves for the purpose of self- and community improvement. Sorosis and the New England Women’s Club were among the first of these local organizations, but they quickly proliferated throughout the country, and by 1890 the largely white General Federation of Women’s Clubs was founded as an umbrella entity. Black women’s clubs emerged not only because white women’s clubs prohibited their membership, except in New England, but because they had a unique set of issues—defending black womanhood, uplifting the masses, and improving family life, to name a few.

  Five years after the General Federation of Women’s Clubs
was organized, the first national convention of black women’s clubs took place in Boston in 1895. The specific catalyst was a letter that Florence Belgarnie, an officer of the Anti-Lynching Committee in London, received from John Jacks, an American newspaper editor. Angry over Belgarnie’s antilynching activities, which had been encouraged by Ida Wells Barnett’s antilynching crusade in England, Jacks wrote her a letter defending the white South and maligning black women for their immorality. In turn, Belgarnie sent a copy of the letter to Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, a black member of the largely white New England Women’s Club and founder, in 1893, of the New Era Club for black women. Later she distributed the letter to numerous black women’s clubs and called for a national conference in Boston in 1895, which resulted in the formation of the National Federation of Afro-American Women.

  When this historic gathering of black clubwomen occurred, a number of items were on the agenda—temperance, higher education, home life, morality, and education for girls and boys—however, it was also clear that black female empowerment for individual and race advancement was the overriding objective:... we need to talk over not only those things which are of vital importance to us as women, but also the things that are of especial interest to us as colored women ... what we especially can do in the moral education of the race . . . our mental elevation and physical development ... how to make the most of our own ... limited opportunities ... (Women’s Era, September 1895, 2).

  An important goal of the meeting was vindicating the honor of black women and denouncing Jacks. In 1896, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) was formed as a result of a merger between the Federation and Mary Church Terrell’s National League of Colored Women of Washington, D.C.

  A pivotal moment in black women’s publishing history and the coming of age politically for clubwomen occurred with the founding of Women’s Era. In 1890, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin organized the New Era Club in Boston and initiated its journal, which eventually became the official organ of the NACW. The first issue came out March 24, 1894, and twenty-four issues were published through 1897. Since it was founded, edited, and published by suffragist Ruffin, it is not surprising to find in the publication a strong advocacy of woman suffrage, especially for black women.