Fannie Barrier Williams, whom white women in Chicago had excluded from their club, summed up the difference between the white club movement and the club movement among her people. Black women, she said, had come to realize that … progress includes a great deal more than what is generally meant by the terms culture, education and contact. The club

Campaigning for the ten-hour day, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association presented petitions to the Massachusetts State Legislature in 1843 and 1844. When the Legislature agreed to hold public hearings, the Lowell women acquired the distinction of winning the very first investigation of labor conditions by a government body in the history of

Women were welcomed at the 1869 founding convention of the National Colored Labor Union. As the Black workers explained in one resolution, they did not want to commit ‘the mistakes heretofore made by our white fellow citizens in omitting women’. 5 This Black labor organization, created because of the exclusionary policies of white labor groups,

From Reconstruction to the present, Black women household workers have considered sexual abuse perpetrated by the ‘man of the house’ as one of their major occupational hazards. Time after time they have been victims of extortion on the job, compelled to choose between sexual submission and absolute poverty for themselves and their families. The

Since slave women were classified as ‘breeders’ as opposed to ‘mothers’, their infant children could be sold away from them like calves from cows. One year after the importation of Africans was halted, a South Carolina court ruled that female slaves had no legal claims whatever on their children. Consequently, according to this ruling, children

Black male suffrage – as spelled out in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Constitutional Amendments proposed by the Republicans – was a tactical move designed to ensure the political hegemony of the Republican party in the chaotic postwar South. The Republican Senate leader Charles Sumner had been a passionate proponent of woman suffrage until the

Even the most radical white abolitionists, basing their opposition to slavery on moral and humanitarian grounds, failed to understand that the rapidly developing capitalism of the North was also an oppressive system. They viewed slavery as a detestable and inhuman institution, an archaic transgression of justice. But they did not recognize that the

As W. E. B. DuBois observed: It is always difficult to stop war, and doubly difficult to stop civil war. Inevitably, when men have long been trained to violence and murder, the habit projects itself onto civil life, after peace, and there is crime and disorder and social upheaval.19

Let Southern oppressors tremble – let their Northern apologists tremble – let all the enemies of the persecuted Blacks tremble … Urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest – I will not equivocate – I will not excuse – I will not retreat a single inch – and I will be heard.17 This uncompromising declaration was