History of Black Women Suffrage

The more I worked, the angrier I got at the white suffragists who excised from their history the black women who had stood beside them advocating for the vote.  Susan B. Anthony inscribed to Adella Logan Hunt a copy of the very volume that makes no mention of black women's efforts?






Is this not what digital history can do best? Is the Black Woman Suffrage database, already a corrective to History of Woman Suffrage, not the perfect place to assemble a one?

Searching the 904 files for any that contained rights or suffrage yielded 282 items.  To parallel the History of Woman Suffrage meant only using items up to 1920 and excluding fiction, leaving 202 items..

The table of contents for my volume begins with Maria Stewart's 1832 stirring speech "Cause for Encouragement" published in The Liberator and runs through excerpts from the National Association of Colored Women's Association Meeting Notes.

A skim of the list of contributing publications revels not only The Liberator and other abolitionist publications, but like the National Association of Colored Women's Association Meeting Notes, consists of others by and for black women,  such as The Women's Era, the first monthly newspaper published by African-American women, Josephine St Pierre Ruffin.

And among the most frequent contributors are names less familiar that Sojourner Truth or Ida B. Wells, such as  Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Fannie Barrier Williams, Rosalie M. Jonas, and Victoria Earle Matthews.

What if I'd had their writings, alongside those of the almost exclusively white suffragists compiled in the History of Woman Suffrage. What sort of discourse of rights and suffrage might emerge?  How would gender appear?

While my research contract precludes me from assembling the History of Black Woman Suffrage, below you can see the table of contents.

If the editors of the HWS had access to the black woman suffrage database, and most of these items they would surely have been able to access, they could have selected from 173 potential candidates for inclusion in the first volume.  From my analysis, I know they preferred items that talked about "woman's rights."  While 102 items contain some mention of slavery or slaves in the metadata general subject headings, only 12 contain “women” in the subject field and 9 are written by Mary Shadd Cary.  Searching files for the phrase "woman's rights" reveals that in the period before 1861, which is what is covered in the HWS, there are only four that even use the phrase, two of which are attributed to Sojourner Truth the black woman suffragists who worked most closely with the editors of the HWS. [1]

Cary is the most prolific author in the database for this era and it is difficult to see how the editors of the HWS excluded her. Cary, the editor of the Provincial Freeman, often wrote pieces virtually identical to those that appeared in white papers that supported abolition or woman’s rights.

Shadd’s response to the schism in the movement over black male suffrage was to form her own association for black woman suffrage, the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise Association, but to also continue at times to work with the NWSA which makes her exclusion even more puzzling (Terbog Penn 38). Unlike the white suffragists who willingly sacrificed black woman suffrage on the altar of various “strategies,” Cary crafted an argument for black woman suffrage was “in keeping with the mainstream suffragists” when she argued before the House Judiciary committee in 1874, although precisely what she said has been lost to history, as it was “never recorded for the public transcript.”



[1] In face in the 202 item  corpus of nonfiction writing that I have "woman's rights" appears l30 times.