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Origins of the Movement & Difference from the White Women’s Suffrage Movement

The origins of the African-American Suffrage movement are inextricably tied to that of the Anti-Slavery movement. Upper-class white women first articulated their own oppression in marriage and the private sphere using the metaphor of slavery, and first developed a political consciousness by mobilizing in support of the Abolition/Anti-Slavery movement.

The racism that defined the early twentieth century ensured that black women were oppressed from every side: first, for their status as women, and then again for their race. Many politically engaged African-American women were primarily invested in matters of racial equality, with suffrage later materializing as a secondary goal. The Seneca Falls Convention, widely lauded as the first women’s rights convention, can also be considered the precursor to the racial schism within the women’s suffrage movement; the Seneca Falls Declaration put forth a political analysis of the condition of upper class, married women, but all but ignored the plight of working class white women, and black women at large. Well into the twentieth century, a pattern seemed to emerge of segregated political activism, as black and white women tended to organize separately due to class and racial tensions within the suffrage movement, and a fundamental difference in movement goals and political consciousness. According to Goodier, black women “rarely separated the quest for the vote from the other activism in which they engaged”, and racism at large added to the urgency of their more multi-faceted activism. Most black women who later supported the expansion of the franchise sought “to improve the status of black women in addition to that of black men and children”, which radically set them apart from their white counterparts. While well-off white women often focused on obtaining the franchise, black women sought the betterment of their communities overall, rather than their individual betterment exclusively as women. Angela Davis explains, “black women were equal to their men in the oppression they suffered…and they resisted slavery with a passion equal to their men’s”, which highlights the source of their more holistic activism. Following the civil war, many African-American women struggled to keep their interests at the forefront of the political sphere, as many reformers tended to assume in their rhetoric for “black to be male and women to be white”.