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Filmed reenactment of Frances Harper’s 1866 speech at the 11th National Woman’s Rights Convention
Ariana DeBose as Frances Harper, 2019
Special thanks to the CUNY School of Professional Studies
“We are all bound up
together”
- Frances Harper
In 1866, African American lecturer, writer, and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper took the floor at the 11th National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York City. The newly enacted 13th Amendment had abolished slavery but left the unanswered questions of citizenship and voting rights on the minds of the Black and white men and women in attendance. Elizabeth Cady Stanton opened the convention noting Reconstruction’s opportunity to “base our government on the broad principle of equal rights for all.” Harper, a skilled orator, challenged listeners to see that working collectively to expand rights for all Americans would strengthen the nation, but also required acknowledging existing inequality. Inspired by the momentous speech and the day’s proceedings, Susan B. Anthony sponsored a resolution for the group to dedicate itself to attaining universal suffrage for both Black men and for women. The convention quickly voted to form a new organization, the American Equal Rights Association.
Frances Harper, ca. 1860
Homespun Heroines and other women of distinction Courtesy of The New York Public Library
Proceedings of the Eleventh National
Woman's Rights Convention, held at the Church of the Puritans,
New York, May
10, 1866
Patricia D. Klingenstein Library,
New-York Historical Society
The Nurse’s Manual belonging to
Georgeanna Woolsey Bacon, ca. 1861
Patricia
D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
Georgeanna
Woolsey trained at New York Hospital in 1861 for work caring for wounded
soldiers aboard transport ships. Woolsey also organized a Sanitary Commission
initiative to feed and shelter injured soldiers after the battle of Gettysburg,
and supervised nurses at army hospitals.
“My heart is full, my country
is bleeding”
- Angelina Grimké Weld
Women joined the Civil War effort as nurses, cooks, and laundry workers. Welcomed by the federal government, but not always by army doctors, nurses served in hospitals, worked on steamboats transporting injured troops, and organized field hospitals. Women also coordinated fundraising efforts, made bandages, and gathered supplies. In addition, they organized large-scale Sanitary Fairs, which raised funds for the army. The New York Metropolitan Fair alone raised over one million dollars, overseen by a female treasurer. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, Northern women workers were joined by enslaved women, who fled plantations for Union lines. Abolitionists, both Black and white, organized support networks for formerly enslaved people to provide shelter, food, clothing, and education. Many organizations were created and operated entirely by women.
Dinah, ca. 1864
Carte
de visite
Patricia
D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
The back of this photograph contains a handwritten note identifying its subject as
Dinah, the camp cook for the New York National Guard’s Sixth Company, Seventh
Regiment. Dinah was a common
name of the time, however, Union soldiers also sometimes used "Dinah"
as a catch-all name to refer to all Black women in the South. Unlike
enslaved men, women could not win freedom through military service. Instead,
they worked for the army as cooks, laundresses, and agricultural workers on
Union-captured plantations. Although many women came alone or as the family
head, Union policymakers promoted marriage at the army camps to manage the huge
numbers of enslaved people, who had never been able to marry legally. Black
women gained freedom but also became subject to the laws of coverture.
Georgeanna
Woolsey Bacon, ca. 1862
Carte
de visite
Patricia
D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
Metropolitan Fair entrance ticket and
art gallery ticket, 1864
Patricia
D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
Bank
of America bank book,
ca. 1864
Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York
Historical Society
Metropolitan Fair to Housekeepers, 1864
Patricia
D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
Women staffing New York Metropolitan
Fair art gallery, 1864
Stereograph
Patricia
D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
Splitting a Movement
Ratified in 1870, the 15th Amendment declares that US citizens’ right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged . . . on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The omission of the mention of gender embittered suffragists and divided the once-allied abolitionist and women’s rights movements. Following on the heels of the 14th Amendment, which added the word “male” to its description of voting citizens, the new amendment focused attention on the vote over other aspects of women’s rights and forced considerations about societal reform. Would Black men’s suffrage pave the way for the women’s cause, or should activists demand change on a grander scale? The argument exposed a complicated truth: not all abolitionist men supported women’s rights, and not all white suffragists supported African American suffrage. Two organizations emerged in the amendment’s wake. The National Woman Suffrage Association opposed the 15th Amendment and demanded a 16th Amendment for women’s suffrage. Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe’s American Woman Suffrage Association, on the other hand, supported the 15th Amendment and a state strategy to win suffrage.
“We are human beings, and as such entitled to all human rights”
- Charlotte Rollin
Black women worked in national suffrage organizations and also formed their own groups, advocating for both universal suffrage and civil rights. Newly established schools and universities increased the number of educated Black women, many of whom taught freed men and women in the South. Within Black religious institutions, women worked with sympathetic men to gain the ability to hold higher offices and vote on church matters. They also called on the nation’s justice system to defend them in the face of unequal treatment in society. In petitioning for the passage of the Sumner Civil Rights Act, Black women in Washington, DC noted their need for legal protections. “We suffer indignities in public conveyances, we are deprived of privileges & advantages to which we are justly entitled in common with others,” they declared.
Elizabeth
Keckley, ca. 1860
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center,
Manuscript Division, Howard University, Washington, DC
A
formerly enslaved woman who purchased her own freedom, Elizabeth Keckley worked
as dressmaker to Mary Lincoln and founded the Washington, DC-based Contraband
Relief Association in 1862. Freedwomen prioritized family reunification and
advocated for legal and civil protections in the face of white violence.
Ida
B. Wells
Southern
Horrors: lynch law in all its phases,
1892
Aberdeen
Scotland: Thomson & Duncan, Printers
Patricia
D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
As Reconstruction collapsed, racial violence and new
laws forced Black Americans out of political life, halted economic gains, and
denied them civil rights. In 1892, journalist Ida B. Wells launched an
investigation into over 700 lynchings. Her campaign emphasized the hypocrisy
and untruth of claims that lynching was a justified response to Black men
raping white women by calling out the enduring sexual exploitation of Black
women by white men. Lacking capital to publish her work, Wells found support in
Black women, who organized a successful fundraising dinner in New York. Wells’s
public defense of the integrity of Black women inspired many to activism.
Petition
from women of the District of Columbia asking for the passage of the Sumner
Civil Rights Bill, 1872
Records of the United States Senate, National Archives
Freedom on the Plantation, ca. 1864
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division,
Washington, D.C.
Mary
Brown searching for her daughter, 1866
The Daily Dispatch
Courtesy
of the Library of Virginia
Temperance
The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, a national network working to limit alcohol consumption, grew out of the 1873–74 Women’s Crusade, a movement of Midwestern women who protested outside saloons. Outraged by the impact of male alcoholism on women and families, WCTU members gained experience with large-scale organizing, public speaking, and lobbying politicians. In 1881, Frances Willard, the WCTU’s president, formally endorsed women’s suffrage to give women direct power to support temperance candidates and legislation. Willard, like many middle-class suffragists, favored voter qualification tests over universal suffrage. She also precipitated a public feud with Ida B. Wells by initially failing to support anti-lynching legislation. Yet many Black women such as Frances Harper, Sarah Woodson Early, and Lucy Thurman worked for the WCTU, despite their opposition to its segregated chapters.
The
Facts in the Case, ca. 1888
Chicago:
Woman's Temperance Publication Association
Patricia
D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
Temperance crusaders in front of grocery, 1873
Courtesy of the Ohio History Connection (SC
1887)
Frances
Harper WCTU branch, Seattle, ca. 1895
Twice
Sold, Twice Ransomed by Mr. and Mrs. L.P. Ray
The Burke Library at Union Theological
Seminary,
Columbia University in the City of New York
Go West, Young Woman
Women in Western states and territories made greater advances towards suffrage than Eastern women. Their advocacy took place amidst fiercely debated questions of race, immigration, and citizenship. Although the West might have accepted white women’s suffrage, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese immigrants—both male and female—faced legislative barriers around property rights, access to public education, and voting. White assumptions about Chinese immigrant women led to overreporting of prostitution by census-takers and the prohibition of Chinese women’s immigration with the 1875 Page Act. Wyoming’s Democratic legislature granted women the franchise in 1870 to gain publicity—and Democratic voters—for the territory, and to respond to the 15th Amendment. In the 1870 congressional election, around 1000 Wyoming women cast their ballots. That year, women in Utah voted at the state level. An 1887 anti-polygamy law took away the franchise, which women regained in 1896. Colorado women won school suffrage in 1876, and in 1893 campaigned for full suffrage in the first successful statewide referendum in the nation.
Early women voters, Denver, 1894
History Colorado
State Presidents and Officers of the
National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1892.
Bryn Mawr College Special Collections
Women on the Ballot
In 1872, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to run for president as the Equal Rights Party nominee. Despite questions about their eligibility to vote, women, she reasoned, still could run for political office. Lawyer Belva Lockwood followed in 1884, endorsing equal rights, temperance, civil service reform, and citizenship for Native Americans. Lockwood, the first woman to argue before the Supreme Court, won around 4,000 votes in her presidential bid.
Presidential
ballot for Belva Lockwood, 1884
The Dobkin Family Collection of Feminism
Belva Lockwood campaign ribbon, 1886
The
Dobkin Family Collection of Feminism
Mathew
B. Brady
Victoria
Woodhull, ca. 1870
Patricia
D. Klingenstein Library,
New-York Historical Society