- Good afternoon, everyone.
I'm Tomiko Brown-Nagin,
dean of the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced
Study at Harvard University.
It's my pleasure to
welcome you to the opening
session of our conference--
Voting Matters--
Gender, Citizenship,
and the Long 19th Amendment.
This six-part series
is timed to mark
the centennial of
the 19th Amendment
to the US Constitution
and to focus our attention
on key moments in the
complex history of gender
and citizenship in
the United States.
It is fitting that
we would begin today,
on Women's Equality
Day, exactly 100 years
after Secretary of
State Bainbridge Colby
signed the proclamation
that officially
certified the ratification
of the 19th Amendment.
But August 26, 1920
was not, in fact,
the end of the
suffrage struggle.
The 19th Amendment
did not immediately
allow every American
woman to vote.
And the fight to extend
full citizenship rights
to all Americans
continues today.
Nor was July 19,
1848 the beginning.
That was the first day of
the Seneca Falls Convention,
organized by Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and others.
But our distinguished speaker
this afternoon, Martha Jones,
will help us understand
the origins of the suffrage
movement and activism by
African-American women
during the 1830s.
Efforts like this to explore
the full, complex history
of suffrage lie at the heart of
Radcliffe's long 19th Amendment
project, which is led by my
colleague, Jane Kamensky,
and supported by a grant
from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation.
This lecture series is
the public culmination
of that ambitious and
important undertaking.
Jane will offer framing remarks,
and more formally introduce
Martha Jones in just a moment.
But before I hand
off to Jane, I want
to take this opportunity
to express my gratitude
to her, to the entire
Schlesinger Library staff,
and to the Long 19th Amendment
Project's steering committee
members, who helped plan our
Voting Matters conference,
and then helped reframe it
for this new virtual format.
And of course, this
series would not
be possible without the tireless
effort of Becky Wasserman,
executive director of academic
ventures and engagement,
Jessica Viklund,
director of events,
and their outstanding teams.
Thank you.
And finally, I want
to take a moment
to acknowledge members of the
Radcliffe Institute Leadership
Society and all
our annual donors.
Your generosity keeps Radcliffe
programming free and open
to the public.
And we thank you.
Welcome once more, and
now it's my pleasure
to give the virtual floor
to Jane Kamensky, who
is the Pforzheimer Foundation
Director of the Schlesinger
Library here at Radcliffe, as
well as the Jonathan Trumbull
Professor of American History
in Harvard's Faculty of Arts
and Sciences.
Jane?
- Good afternoon, everyone.
It's truly a thrill
for my colleagues
and me to be here with you
on this Centennial Day.
Schlesinger Library has been
thinking about this anniversary
for a long time--
in some ways, since Women's
Equality Day in the year
1943, when the
library was founded
with the Women's Suffrage
Collection of Maud Wood Park
Radcliffe College Class of 1898.
We've been planning in earnest
for the past four years,
funded by a generous grant
from the Andrew W. Mellon
foundation, with crucial
support from Radcliffe Institute
and Harvard's Faculty
of Arts and Sciences.
Since today's theme
is origins stories
and today's session
marks the opening
of our semester-long series
on gender and citizenship
in the United States, I'm
going to offer a little origin
story of my own.
Schlesinger's Long
19th Amendment Project
was born in 2016 in a
conversation in my office
with a researcher, Professor
Corinne Field of University
of Virginia, who came
in to talk about how
the library, with its preeminent
archival collections on women's
suffrage, might infuse this
coming anniversary with meaning
and purpose.
Like any good
grassroots organizer,
Cori then helped
rally key leaders--
the historian Susan Ware,
who was working on a new book
called Why They Marched, and
Professor Lisa Tetreault,
of Carnegie Mellon
University, whose
prize-winning book, The
Myth of Seneca Falls,
had exposed grave
originary flaws
in many conventional
suffrage histories.
Together we decided that's
Schlesinger should concentrate
its Centennial
energies on supporting
the kinds of scholarship
that could transform
the history of gender and
American voting rights,
setting the year 1920 in a
broader span of time, a wider
and more complex geography, and
within a more capacious matrix
of citizenship struggles.
We would underwrite scholars
asking questions that would
yield fresh histories and--
fresh histories now and over
the coming decades of research
so that by the sesquicentennial
in 2070-- may we
all live to see it--
we would be reading
something quite different.
We would serve up Schlesinger
Libraries collections
for the common good, as we
are through our Open Access
Portal, which formally
opened yesterday.
And I know that address will be
pushed out to you in the chat.
We would interrogate
the archive, as well,
attending to its
silences and omissions
and thinking about how
best to speak into them.
Mellon Foundation's
support has since
allowed us to sponsor year-long
fellows, summer residencies
for teachers and
public historians,
as well as scholars,
a digital humanist
to superintend our portal,
innovative courses at Harvard
College, exhibitions, and
now finally this conference,
starting with today's
keynote address
by Martha S. Jones, who
is Society of Black Alumni
Presidential Professor
and professor
of history at Johns Hopkins.
Jones is a preeminent
historian of American law,
and especially of United
States citizenship.
Next month she will
publish the book Vanguard--
How Black Women Broke Barriers,
Won the Vote, and Insisted
On Equality For All.
Vanguard is a fitting title,
since Jones's own work
represents the vanguard
of a new wave of history
that I think exemplifies a core
commitment of Schlesinger's
Long 19th Amendment Project--
not just to tear down older,
exclusionary origin stories,
but to actually build
truer, more plural, and more
variegated histories
of women and the work
of American citizenship--
work that included but has
never been limited to obtaining
and exercising the vote.
I want to close
with round of thanks
that will surely leave
important people out,
for which I apologize.
Thanks to the Mellon
Foundation, of course,
to the original three
stars on our suffrage flag,
Cori, Lisa, and Susan, to the
staff of Schlesinger Library,
nearly every one
of whom has worked
on this project over
the last four years,
and especially to
the digital team
led by Jen Weintraub, the
research services team,
led by Ellen Shea,
and Marilyn Dunn,
without whom nothing
would ever happen period.
To the members of
the planning groups
and the Harvard
University steering
committee for this
project, all of whom
are listed in the portal.
To the students
from Harvard College
and from Cambridge Rindge
and Latin High School who
worked with the Long 19th this
summer, to the supporters whose
generosity has amplified
the reach of this project
in many directions, and finally
to my Radcliffe colleagues,
including Dean's List Beth
Cohen and Tamiko Brown-Nagin,
and especially to Rebecca
Wasserman and Jessica Viklund,
who, together with
their staffs, helped
us manage this complicated
pivot to the virtual.
So finally, enough preface.
It is my pleasure now to
pass the virtual floor
to Professor Martha Jones.
Her formal remarks
will be followed
by a conversation between her
and Professor Lisa Tetreault,
after which Professor Tetreault
will moderate questions
from the audience.
You can use the Q&A
feature on your Zoom
to submit questions at any
point during the discussion,
remembering that
keeping your questions
short will increase the
likelihood that the speakers
will have the chance to
address as many as possible
in the time we have.
So thank you, and
over to you, Martha.
- Thanks very much, Jane.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Good afternoon, everyone.
I'm coming to you from
Greenport, New York.
And I'm really honored
for the opportunity
to be together
virtually and to get
this extraordinary series of
conversations, Voting Matters,
underway.
So thank you to Dean
Tomiko Brown-Nagin,
to Professor Jane Kamensky,
to Professor Lisa Tetreault,
who will join us a bit later.
And of course, thank you
to the Radcliffe Institute
and the Schlesinger Library.
This is an extraordinary
undertaking,
and I'm incredibly honored
to be a part of it.
My charge was to talk--
is to talk about
origins stories.
And there is, I think,
a gentle fallacy
in the notion of origins.
As historians, we
must begin somewhere.
And still sometimes it seems
we might begin anywhere.
And as my friend and
colleague, Lisa Tetreault,
has frequently insisted,
there are many-- perhaps even
countless-- origin
stories when it
comes to the history of the 19th
Amendment and women's votes.
And still, we have
to start somewhere.
For me, in the writing of the
history of Black American women
and voting rights, the place
to begin is with ideas.
I knew that over
time, the women I
write about came
to think, organize,
and work toward political
rights through a specific set
of ideas--
a critique, in fact,
one that insisted
that neither race nor sex
had any legitimate place
in arbitrating rights and power,
including access to the ballot.
It is a facet of their
political philosophy.
While not unique
to Black women, it
is one that binds them
together and helps
us to recognize their distinct
contribution to debates that
began in the early
19th century, debates
that we might say
continue even until today.
So my work begins
with Black women
as thinkers, as producers
of ideas, as intellectuals,
and even, we might say,
political philosophers.
They ask questions
about equality, dignity,
and human rights, and answer
them with a bold claim.
When they, as Black women
in the United States,
arrive at these ends,
the entire nation
will have arrived with them.
In my story, these
ideas begin with a woman
named Jarena Lee, an itinerant
Black Methodist preacher
of the early 19th century.
Now, church might be an
odd or unexpected place
to begin a story about
the 19th Amendment.
And still, Lee's contributions,
her ideas, and the movement
that she ignited among
Black Methodist women
was one of those
essential starting places
for understanding, as
we say, what comes next.
What begins as the
singular reflections
of a remarkable woman lead
us to a thread of ideas
that mix with activism,
all of which fuel
Black women's road
to voting rights.
Theirs is a story that
defy the often invoked
sacred-secular divide.
It situates Black
women's struggles
for votes and
their voting rights
squarely in an institutional
and cultural space that they
shared with men.
It is one key to
understanding how
it was that suffrage
associations were not
an easy fit from the
perspective of Black women.
And when the Black women lay--
woman lay activist Eliza
Ann Gardner delivers
the benediction at the opening
of what becomes the National
Association of Colored Women
at the end of the 19th century,
we understand better
why Black women's ideas
and their leadership-- including
their push for voting rights--
found a home there.
Jarena Lee did not
initially intend
to upend power in her church.
As a young woman,
she first asked
questions about her
spiritual mission,
the genuineness of her
calling, the correctness
of her biblical interpretation,
and her capacity
to convert souls.
And yet, she could not
pose such questions
without also bumping into
the limits that womanhood
placed on her purpose.
She underwent a
conversion and arrived
at a life-defining insight.
She would give into a
calling from God and preach.
Trouble arose, of course,
when that divine purpose
led Jarena to speak with
authority on spiritual matters
and do so in public.
Jarena lived a
humble early life.
She was born in Cape
May, New Jersey, in 1783,
just at the end of the
American Revolution.
She was bound out as a servant
at a young age, just seven
years old, robbing
her of a childhood.
Her liberation story
began at the age of 21,
when Jarena converted
to Christianity.
As an adult, she was free
as an eager new Christian
to experiment with what it
meant to be spiritually unbound.
Jarena struggled,
and her troubles
centered on the condition of her
soul, rather than on her status
as a woman.
Her religious journey went
from self-doubt, despair,
and contemplation of
suicide, just time
spent searching for a home in
the Presbyterian, Catholic,
and Anglican faiths.
Finally, she was
moved to conversion
in Philadelphia's young African
Methodist Episcopal Church.
Signs that Jarena would not
be a conventional adherent
to the faith surfaced early on--
first in her exuberant worship
style, one that mixed prayer
with passionate tears
and even fevers, and then
in her striving for
sanctification--
a perfection on earth that went
beyond traditional Methodist
teachings.
Jarena was, from the
start, ambitious--
even excessive.
In 1811, four or five
years after joining
the AME Church, Jarena
distinctly heard
and most certainly
understood, as she put it,
a voice that insisted that
she go preach the gospel.
She wrestled with
an urge to tell
her local minister, Richard
Allen, of her calling,
but then hesitated--
a sign of just how
inflammatory her ambition was.
Not the first woman to speak
publicly about the scripture,
she was among the very first
to seek the formal approval
of her church.
Thus began a many decades
long fight for Jarena,
and the stakes were high.
The AME Church was navigating
a delicate separation
from the white-led
Methodist Episcopal
Church, which refused to ordain
Black ministers and bishops
and refused to transfer the
ownership of church property
to Black congregations.
Allen, leader of Jarena's
local congregation,
would go on to become
the sect's head bishop.
He was an experienced
minister committed
to safeguarding the future
of his religious community.
Was Jarena, a preaching
woman, an asset
or a threat to this
new Black Methodism?
Allen initially tried
to duck the question,
doubting that Jarena's
call was genuine.
The two went back
and forth privately.
Allen valued her
talents, but he doubted
that church law permitted him
to license her as a preacher.
He hoped that Jarena would
accept a more limited role
in which she
preached occasionally
with the permission
of a local minister.
Jarena tried to live within
the bounds of this compromise.
She married an AME
minister, and then six years
into their marriage,
Lee's husband died.
Although she
suffered, she was also
free to return to the
spiritual fire that
had been suppressed when
she played the ill-suited
role of minister's wife.
Lee returned to Philadelphia
and Bishop Allen's sanctuary
and hoped to find
a middle ground.
All that changed, though
not exactly by design,
when Lee attended the sermon
of a guest minister who,
at one moment, seemed
to have lost the spirit.
He faltered.
Lee, in turn, sprang to action,
moved by, as she put it,
supernatural
impulse to her feet.
She then, standing in the pew,
delivered an impromptu sermon
that explained how she,
like the bible's Jonah,
had been kept away
from her true calling.
As Lee sat down, Allen
rose and declared
that her call to preach
was as genuine as that
of any male minister present.
That day launched
Lee's preaching career.
Over the next 30 years,
she measured her efforts
by miles traveled and
sermons delivered.
In 1827, for example,
she covered 2,325 miles
and delivered 178 sermons.
10 years later, in 1837,
she preached 146 times
and rode just shy
of 1,000 miles.
She was nothing
short of tireless,
but she also had to be fearless,
especially when journeying
alone.
Lee regularly provoked question.
Did a woman have
the right to preach?
Troubles surfaced in
Salem, West Jersey
from the elder who,
like many others,
was averse to a
woman's preaching.
In nearby Woodstown,
a church elder
said he did not believe that
ever a soul was converted
under the preaching of a woman.
And yet, when Lee's
visit finished,
the two shook hands in
a concession of sorts.
In Milford, Maryland, she
arrived by invitation,
knowing that preaching women
had already generated objections
there.
In Redding, Pennsylvania, Lee
encountered the Reverend James
Ward, who was so prejudiced
that he would not let me speak
in the pulpit, she reported.
Ward was later, according
to Lee, rightly turned out
of the church.
In Princeton, New
Jersey, local ministers
banded together to stop her
from preaching there altogether.
A woman's right to
preach turned out
to be more than
incidental to Lee's work.
Her rights as a woman fused
with her divine calling.
Lee briefly stepped away from
the pulpit in the 1830s just
long enough to put pen to paper.
What emerged was one
part hard-learned lessons
and one part manifesto
on church women's power.
In 1836, the first edition
of her spiritual memoir,
Religious Experience and Journal
of Mrs. Jarena Lee appeared.
She put the question plainly--
why should it be thought
impossible, heterodox,
or improper for a
woman to preach?
The answer, in her view, lay
not with men, but instead
with the wonder of the divine
and the unequivocal authority
of the Bible.
She wrote, "For as unseemly
as it may appear nowadays
for women to preach, it should
be remembered that nothing
is impossible with God.
Did not Mary, a woman,
preach the gospel?"
Lee explained, "I
frequently found families
who told me that they
had not for several years
been to a meeting.
And yet, when
listening to hear what
God would say by his poor,
colored female instrument,
have believed with trembling
tears rolling down their cheeks
the signs of contrition and
repentance towards God."
Lee's moving
successes demonstrated
that women could transform the
lives of individual believers.
Do they also have the power
to alter the institutions they
called home?
The framing of Lee's
tract suggested yes.
And its pages circulated,
along with their author,
from churches to revivals
and camp meetings.
The rights of women preachers
were women's rights.
By the 1840s, preaching
women no longer
toiled as solitary
figures, as had Jarena Lee.
Around her grew up
a sisterhood that
included church
women, lay women,
and their concern
soon became hers--
excuse me, her concerns
soon became theirs.
Members of groups
calling themselves
the Daughters of Zion and
the Daughters of Conference
came to church politics by
way of conventional routes,
starting out as
help meets to men
who expected to
steer religious life
and then challenged
the limits placed
upon them in those circles.
Their work required organizing,
subterfuge, alliances
with men sympathetic
to their cause.
Black church women knew that
when they invoked rights,
above all else they
were aiming to break
men's monopoly on the pulpit.
But in the spring of 1844,
the Daughters of Zion
faced a problem.
They planned to attend that
year's AME Church General
Conference.
And the women knew that
church rituals invited them
in, but also kept them silent.
If they wanted to be heard,
they needed a strategy.
Perhaps they
conspired beforehand,
or maybe they
hatched a plan only
after arriving in Pittsburgh
for the conference.
Banded together, women
in the AME Church
prepared to fight for the right
to have preaching licenses.
How to accomplish that
in the face of the 68
ministerial delegates
who had no intention
of listening to them at all?
The challenge
demanded ingenuity.
And the women
devised a scheme that
promised to be controversial.
The Daughters of Conference
approached the Reverend Dr.
Nathan Ward, a missionary
delegate and founding member
of the Church's
Indiana Conference
and proposed that he act
as their spokesperson.
They handed him ammunition--
a petition.
At the conference, Ward
rose before the dozens
of men delegates.
Looking on was itinerant
preacher Julia Foote,
who later described the
mayhem that erupted.
This caused quite a sensation,
bringing many members
to their feet at once.
They all talked and
screamed to the bishop,
who could scarcely keep order.
The conference was so
incensed at the brother who
offered the petition
that they threatened
to take action against him.
The women's demands
were explosive
and the resolution failed.
Still, the church women put
the leadership on notice
that they had organized
as a sisterhood.
And if the results of the
1844 meeting discouraged them,
the Daughters of Conference
gave no sign of it.
Over the next four
years, they prepared
to continue the battle.
By 1848, the General
Conference scene
had grown only
more intimidating.
Women gathered in the
hallways and on the periphery
of the conference chamber.
There, they observed men--
a leadership of a
burgeoning denomination
that came from 14 states, 175
officials, 375 lay leaders.
The agenda was ambitious.
It included electing a
bishop, structuring the church
missionary society,
establishing a book depository,
planning for common schools,
and enacting sanctions
for divorce and remarriage.
To get on the agenda, the
daughters again needed an ally.
And Philadelphia's JJ Gould
Bias, an abolitionist,
could be trusted to
speak for the women.
The deliberations that
followed haven't survived.
But the record does show that
the daughters scored a victory.
The leadership agreed
to their demand
for women's preaching licenses.
Going forward, women
like Jarena Lee
would not need to
broker special deals
before commanding the pulpit.
There was, however, opposition,
and a rebuttal later
surfaced, making clear that the
war over church women's power
was not over.
Daniel Payne, a
brilliant and ambitious
Baltimore-based minister
warned that women's licenses
were, quote,
"calculated to break up
the sacred relations which
women bear to their husbands
and children and would
lead to the utter neglect
of their household
duties and obligations."
Payne made a record
of his objections,
but in 1848, church women's
rights moved forward.
Only a few months
after AME Church women
scored a first victory for their
rights, women in Seneca Falls,
New York gathered.
And there, they, too,
set forth a demand
for church women's rights.
The Declaration of
Sentiments criticized
thinking that deprived
women of preaching licenses.
He allows her in church
as well as state,
but in a subordinate position,
claiming apostolic authority
for her exclusion
from the ministry,
and with some exceptions,
from any participation
in the affairs of the church.
The meeting's final
resolutions included
a demand that spoke to the
right to preach from the pulpit.
"Resolved, it is
predominantly his duty
to encourage her
to speak and teach
as she has an opportunity in
all religious assemblies."
Black and white
women, even in 1848,
shared a criticism of how
men dominated their faith
communities, but how they
organized already differed.
In early reconstruction,
at the very moment
that the American Equal Rights
Association was debating
the terms of the 14th
and 15th Amendments,
Black Methodist women returned
to debates about their rights.
Again, these were debates
that echoed those swirling
through the politics
of civil society.
In the AME Zion Church, Eliza
Ann Gardner led the way.
She had come of age in
Boston in the decades
before the Civil War, raised
in an activist household.
Whether she was
eavesdropping while perched
on the edge of a settee pouring
cups of tea, lost with her nose
in the pages of the
Liberator, or at attention
during a church or
a political meeting,
Eliza came to know many of
the era's radical luminaries--
thinkers from William
Lloyd Garrison, John Brown,
and Frederick Douglass to
Sojourner Truth and Charles
Sumner stretched her horizons
across the endless miles
of the lecture circuit.
These were lessons in politics
that no primer taught.
By the 1870s, Gardner was
often dubbed the Julia Ward
Howe of her race, a
complement to the strength
of her commitments.
Anti-slavery and
women's suffrage
were interests Gardner shared
with Howe, a white Bostonian.
Gardner, however,
centered her activism
in a spiritual home,
the AME Zion Church.
Gardener was ready to directly
address church women's rights.
And this turn was
no happenstance.
She was a student of history
and knew that since the 1840s,
Black Methodist women
had been demanding--
and for a brief
time, had even won--
the right to preaching licenses.
Something new was
in the air, however,
and it was talk of
women's suffrage.
During the 1860s,
Gardner had witnessed
how abolitionists and
women's rights allies
had clashed over
women's voting rights
in the American Equal
Rights Association.
At home in Massachusetts, she
had seen Black women activists,
along with the Republican Party
and state house leadership,
put women's suffrage on
the agenda, only to fail.
At the podium,
Gardner never failed
to put women's concerns first.
Quote, "Our fathers
and mothers, too,
fought to secure the
glorious boon of liberty."
Gardner admonished those
who assembled in Boston
at the 1876 centennial
celebration of the Declaration
of Independence.
The emphasis is hers--
women's fundraising,
she believed,
was a key to their power.
And Gardner's remarks came
along with a $100 contribution
on behalf of the Lady's
Charitable Association--
a society composed
of colored women.
As if to underscore the
women's political savvy,
she emphasized
that they had voted
to assist the
centennial committee,
operating by political,
even democratic principles.
Then came the bargain.
Quote, "We have made this effort
for more than one reason,"
she explained.
"Black women had been
among the nation's founders
and are American
citizens, all attempts
to waive our claims to
that title to the contrary
notwithstanding."
Gardner hoped to be thanked
for the women's gift
and then expected to be fully
recognized as a rights bearing
person.
Had they been listening,
leaders of the AME Zion Church
would have done
well to take heed.
Gardner was coming
next for them.
As far back as 1868,
the Sisters of Zion--
women of Gardener's
Boston congregation--
had turned to the matter of
church law, the doctrines
and discipline.
They began by giving it
a close, careful read.
Sexism, they discovered, was
baked into the foundation
of their denomination.
So the women got
to work, demanding
that terms like man and
male be purged from the law.
In anticipation of an
upcoming General Conference,
they drafted a request that
the church's governing body
remove all words, et cetera from
the discipline of our church
which prohibit females
from having the same rights
and privileges as male members.
It was a request made
respectfully but unequivocally.
Women like Gardner expected
to have the same rights
as their fathers and husbands.
The General Conference did as
asked and the law was changed.
For Gardener's and Zion's church
women, it was a first victory.
But they were not done.
The women formulated
a next set of demands
that included a call for
the right to hold office.
And again, they won.
The church created the Office of
the Deaconess, a team of women
lay leaders.
Soon women began appearing
in church conferences
as delegates, representing the
men and women of their state
or region.
They took seats as
decision makers.
Hundreds gathered to debate
the church's future, engaged
in lawmaking, and otherwise
directed AME Zion's governance.
It was a sea change.
Soon, women preachers
again received licenses
as part of ordinary business.
And few objected when a
woman stepped into the pulpit
to interpret the scripture.
Women petitioned for control
of their missionary work
and won a new lady's home
and foreign missionary
society, where they
controlled the direction
of benevolent work.
Eliza Gardner urged Zionites
to view women ministers
in the long history
of their church.
"It has been 100 years of joy
and sorrow, labor, conflict,
and triumph.
The century has witnessed
the emancipation of man
and the almost severed
bonds of woman.
'Tis glorious, though,
that this grand old church
is the first religious
organization to accord to women
the same rights she accords
to men, the sterner sex."
Gardener led by a style that
mixed directness with wit.
She won over both men
and women in an appeal
to equality in AME Zion.
The key to her success
lay in the terms
of a bargain, in which
women leverage their labor
to win power.
She wrote, "if you will not try
to do by us the best you can,
you will strengthen our
efforts and make us a power.
But if you commence to talk
about the superiority of men,
if you persist in telling us
that after the fall of man
we were put under
your feet and that we
are intended to be
subject to your will,
we can not help you."
By 1898, the AME Zion Church
stood out among Methodists
and among Protestant
sects generally
by ordaining its first
women to the ministry.
By the time women were
ordained in this church,
it was, of course, the advent
of the era of Jim Crow.
And the concerns of
racism met the concerns
about sexism that had long
animated Eliza Ann Gardner's
public career.
In 1895, Gardner was among
the Black women leaders
who convened a first
meeting of the National
Association of Colored Women.
It was the birth
of a movement that
would mobilize Black women's
power for decades to come.
Gardner was singled
out for leadership--
a recognition of her years
championing women's rights
in the church.
The conventions designated
her its chaplain.
Gardner provided the
opening and closing prayers
at the very first meeting.
She was a force
behind the founding
of another Black
women's movement, one
that combined their
energies to tackle
national problems under the
motto, "lifting as we climb."
When an 1899 Eliza Ann Gardner
signed a letter, "yours
for Zion and the complete
redemption of women
everywhere," she expressed
a political philosophy
in which the struggle for
the rights of church women
was one facet of a fight for
women's rights everywhere.
AME Zion activist
women moved nimbly
between sacred and
secular circles,
cross fertilizing each with
ideas about their rights,
including their capacities
to vote and hold office.
These were not women
who made stark choices
between the pulpit
and a temperance hall
or between missionary society
fundraising and a club movement
convention.
Just as political
debates informed
their religious deliberations,
women's work in churches
was a route to rights
consciousness--
an occasion for honing
arguments and a proving
ground for their capacities
for leadership, governance,
and even political wrangling.
In this, there was power.
On the road to the
19th Amendment,
and then on through the long
struggle to the Voting Rights
Act of 1965, church women
like Jarena Lee and Eliza Ann
Gardner showed a way.
They developed
and refined ideas.
They tested them and
made them do work
in Black Methodist
churches, where
power mattered for the
well-being of all Black
Americans.
In 1920, Hallie Quinn Brown
headed the National Association
of Colored Women.
She faced the arduous task
of now defeating Jim Crow
through winning federal
legislation that
would guarantee the vote
to those Black women--
too many Black
women-- who remained
disenfranchised, despite
a 19th Amendment.
Brown would try first to build
an alliance with the National
Women's Party,
and when rebuffed,
the NACW joined with
civil rights organizations
in a new campaign for
women's and men's votes.
Hallie Quinn Brown had been an
educator and Chautauqua-trained
elocutionist before assuming
the helm of the NACW.
But her political career
had begun elsewhere,
in the AME Church.
"Give her your votes," insisted
Gertrude Bustill Mossell,
referring to Brown in 1892.
Mossell admonished those men
who saw Brown's womanhood
as a bar to her holding
the office of secretary
of education in the AME Church.
"Let the sex have its
representation, for we all
know they willingly accept
more than their share
of the taxation."
With that, a run
for office, Brown
was baptized into
women's politics, part
of a maelstrom in
which, alongside her,
other church women claimed
the right to hold office
as ordained ministers.
Mossell's ideas and
the political savvy
that it took to
further them in church
were what brought
Brown to the NACW
and the long struggle
for Black women's votes.
It was a debt she owed--
in part, of course--
to Jarena Lee.
And with that, I'm now
delighted to invite us--
to invite Lisa Tetreault to
join me for a discussion.
Thanks so much, Lisa, for
being a part of this occasion.
- Thank you so much, Martha, for
being a part of this occasion,
and thanks to all of
you who have joined us.
And thank you--
particularly Martha--
for this forthcoming work
and for the intervention
that you've been so busily
putting into the centennial
and helping us all understand
different ways to narrate
this campaign.
It's been absolutely
instrumental,
I think, in this
particular moment.
And I, like many, are waiting
with great anticipation
for the publication of
Vanguard next month.
How you went about
writing the story in terms
of reading the archive against
the grain-- because of course,
many of the women
you speak of are not
going to show up in suffrage
collections, per se.
And in some ways,
that origin story
that we've had of
1848 to 1920 has so
slanted both the
construction of the archive
and the labeling of
the archive that those
have been the stories that
have most been readily found,
whereas the stories
you're telling us
are coming from elsewhere
in the archives.
And I wondered if you
wanted to take a minute
to talk about the
archives and how
we need to be mindful about
how we use the archives when we
try to recover these stories.
- Yeah, thank you.
You know, I have to
begin by paying tribute
to Dr. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn
and her pioneering work that
is the foundation for
so much of what I write.
And I point to
that to say, I came
of age as a historian at a time
when I could benefit from women
who were already modeling for
us what it meant to challenge
stock narratives, what it
meant to think ambitiously
and in alternative
ways about the archive.
When Dr. Terborg-Penn rereads
the history of women's suffrage
and then discovers--
rediscovers-- surfaces
and helps us think
critically about the places
that Black women occupy and
do not occupy in that story,
I am taking very much her
lead and running with it here.
But it became apparent
to me that there
was a misunderstanding
that I think still
was lurking when I began my
work, which is that somehow
Black women had been
less interested, perhaps
uninterested, in problems
of sex and gender,
and that they had leaned toward
and committed their efforts
to problems of race and racism.
But for me, if I
was a skeptic, what
to do about the
skepticism, I had
to follow Black women
where they were.
And that's how I come to
someone like Jarena Lee,
that if I kept mining the
women's conventions-- or later,
the women's suffrage
associations--
I would be, in a
sense, disappointed,
because I would not
find important numbers
of Black women there.
But I knew that there were
many, many more Black women
activists in all of these
periods, so where were they?
And church is one
answer to that.
And that leads me
down a road to reading
a different kind of archive
with the sorts of questions
we had asked of
suffrage collections.
Where are women?
What are they talking about?
What kind of critiques
are they developing?
What kind of activism
are they engaged in?
And frankly, the first
time I encounter someone
like Eliza Ann Gardner,
I'm flabbergasted--
in part because her ideas are
so directly resonant with what
I knew was being talked about
in women's organizations
and in suffrage associations.
- So here we are in the
centennial of the vote.
And you are giving us
this alternate development
of a women's political
sphere, of women's
political philosophy, of
women's political culture.
And I wondered if you
wanted to speak some
to how you feel that
ends up undergirding
and informing and positioning
itself with a voting demand?
You know, one of the things
that I feel like is happening
is that we've had
this tight conflation
for a long time
between women's rights
and the vote as being
synonymous in some ways, which
is, in part, part of the
myth of Seneca Falls.
And this is now being
uncoupled in useful ways,
but then also reconfigured
in new and different ways.
And I wondered if
you wanted to speak
to how you are trying to
encourage us to reconfigure
our thinking around
the positioning
of those different
issues in time and space?
- I think that this is why a
figure like Eliza Ann Gardner
is so critical to my analysis,
that Gardner is someone who
takes us, if you will, from
many, many decades of activism
centered in churches
and shows us
how both the women of churches,
but also the ideas that they
have refined in churches, move
into the realm of politics
in that moment when she
helps to found the National
Association of Colored Women.
The National Association of
Colored Women is essential.
It's not an accident that
it's founded in the 1890s,
in part because this
is now the period where
we have the advent of
Jim Crow and Black women
band together to
challenge Jim Crow.
But I see the NACW as as near
as Black women get to founding
a suffrage association.
This is the place where tens
and then hundreds of thousands
of Black women
will come together
to advocate for women's votes.
Yes.
This is the organization
that Mary Church Terrell
will head and work through
for a very long time.
And at the same time,
this is an organization
that builds on the
leadership of someone
like Hallie Quinn Brown,
who cuts her teeth in church
and then moves into
the secular realm.
And still this is a
necessary configuration
because Black women aren't
going to work singularly
or exclusively on voting rights.
They are going to couple
their suffrage activity
with, for example, advocacy
for anti-lynching legislation,
which is another essential
piece of the puzzle.
So for me-- and of course, I
had you and our conversations
in mind as I was working
through this talk,
it felt important to demonstrate
the literal connections and not
just the figurative
or, you know,
loose figuration of
ideas, but actually
to show that there are women
like Hallie Quinn Brown,
like Eliza Ann
Gardner, who are moving
from church into the
politics of the NACW
and become suffragists in a
much more discernible sense.
For me, there's no mistaking how
what they learn, what they do,
who they are, how they
organize in church
is fueling the way they make--
they do work that is much
more expressly political.
- Yeah.
And I'll just say this by--
as a kind of transition
to the audience.
I've also heard
you say elsewhere
that when Black women's advocacy
for the vote surfaces, as well,
and where it's positioned, it's
undergirded by a very different
political philosophy, in a way.
And part of what I see
your work doing, as well,
is helping us
understand that when
we're talking about
advocating for the vote in one
context and another, we're
not necessarily talking
about the same thing.
And so I've also
so appreciated how
you've helped us think
about the different ways
in which political traditions
inform that demand.
And that has been, I think,
such a helpful piece,
also to remind us
not only that the who
is different but the pursuit--
the goal is actually different.
And I think we sometimes
homogenize that goal
in a way that also
oversimplifies, I think,
the kind of harmony around
that particular subject.
OK.
So why don't we move
to the audience,
although I would love to talk
with you for an additional hour
and a half.
We'll have time to do that
after this is all over.
There are a variety of
questions coming in.
And one of them, I imagine,
is on many people's minds,
because what you've
done here in this talk,
and in much of your
work, is pivot us away
from the familiar
terrain of abolition
and pivot us away
from Black women's
organizing in abolition and
co-organizing with white women,
and pivoted us toward this
faith tradition and this work
inside churches.
And people are
asking, where would
you position the
story of abolition
and women's activism
in abolition
within this longer
strain of Black women's
political philosophy?
- Thank you.
I think Jarena Lee
is really a precursor
to the emergence of an
abolitionist movement
and Black women's
abolitionist activism.
But abolitionism is not a
substitute, I don't think,
for church activism for the
women about whom I write.
And again, while there
will be important numbers
of Black women in the
abolitionist movement,
if we went, you
know, head for head,
the Black Methodist
churches are far more--
women are far more numerous
there than they are
in the antislavery movement.
So that's one answer.
But it's also true that I
write about Hester Lane, who
in 1840 has been an important
New York-based Black
woman abolitionist, someone
with political ambitions,
wants to become part of the
leadership of the American
Anti-Slavery Society in
those critical years when
the society would become
fractured, precisely
over the elevation of
women to leadership.
In that very fateful meeting
in 1840 when some women--
white women--
do indeed join the
leadership ranks,
Lane is defeated and confronts
a sort of glass ceiling
in the American
Anti-Slavery Society.
So even when we look at
Black women in abolitionism,
we discover that they
confront limitations
on their ability to win
influence and authority to hold
office.
And so the story of abolitionism
is also an uneven one
for African-American women.
- So there are other questions
coming in about the Church
world and the
sacred, including how
would women within that
universe have understood
the difference between sort
of the sacred and the civic
and using voting and
using a religious voice,
and understood the connections
between those two traditions?
And even whether they would have
understood them as different?
- Sure.
- How does faith, then, inform
one's political standing?
- Mm-hmm.
Well, in the example
of Jarena Lee,
I think you can hear
the way in which faith--
and her resolute sense
that she's called by God--
gives her a kind
of spine, right,
and a foundation for her
persistence in the face
of a great deal of opposition.
So I think that's one way to
think about how faith works.
But you know, Black Methodism,
like All-American Methodism,
is a profoundly, simultaneously
hierarchical and democratic
denomination, and works
by way of a hierarchy,
and at the same time, by these
general conferences where
folks vote.
They elect bishops.
They vote on changes
to church law.
So in some ways,
I think the women
I write about see structurally
the ways in which this mirrors,
for example, the kinds of
structures and proceedings
in things like the Colored
Convention Movement, which
is running simultaneously.
And at the same
time, I guess it's
important to reiterate that
African-American churches--
now, this is
something we know, I
think, almost intuitively--
not intuitively.
We know reflexively about
the modern civil rights era.
But it is as true, if not
more true, in the 19th century
that Black churches
are far more than sites
of spiritual
contemplation or refuge.
These are the
central, if you will,
civic organizations in
African-American communities
where folks are pouring
in meager resources--
yes, for the
purposes of worship,
but also for the
purposes of education,
for benevolent work and relief,
and a great-- self-defense
and a great deal more.
So that when we talk about the
politics of Black Methodism,
for example, and of
course, Evelyn Higginbotham
has written about
this so importantly
and informs my work so deeply in
the context of Black Baptists.
There is a great deal more
to church than the sacred.
There is a great deal that is--
we might regard as secular.
That divide doesn't really hold,
I don't think, for the scenes
that I'm drawing.
- Yeah.
More questions are
coming in about archives.
And people would like
to know, where did you
discover these women?
What archives did you use?
Talk more about the nitty gritty
of diving into these records
and where are they
kept, how are they kept?
What's missing from the records?
All those things.
- Yeah.
Thank you, you know,
one of the things--
especially for
this early period--
that was critical, and it's
important to acknowledge,
is that women like Jarena Lee
leave their own record for us.
Lee takes time out from
this very important work
that she does to pen a
memoir, a spiritual memoir,
in the great tradition of
Christian memoir writing.
But she pens that and
leaves it, certainly,
for those who follow her,
those who are inspired her
to understand her story better.
She publishes it and it
is a way to earn money
on the preaching circuit.
But she leaves it
also for us, so
that we can recover her ideas.
And so again and again
in this early period,
I rely very much
on the insistence
by some remarkable Black women
that their work, their lives,
their ideas not only should
animate their moment,
but should become
part of a record.
Now, we know-- and of
course, you have taught us--
all the nuance we needed
to know about a collection,
like the history of women's
suffrage, six volumes,
thousands of pages.
Black women don't quite
engage in projects
that are quite that
ambitious or heavy handed,
but they share the sense that
we are women of consequence.
And we are going
to leave a record.
I write about Maria
Miller Stewart,
the first American
woman, it is thought,
to have stood at a podium,
spoken to a mixed audience
about politics.
Her speeches are published
in William Lloyd's--
William Lloyd Garrison's
The Liberator,
and in her own pamphlet.
And so I depend very much
on the women themselves,
and then the few repositories
that, even early on,
valued and safeguarded and
maintained those materials
for us.
I rely on folks like--
historians like Marilyn
Richardson, who, you know,
gosh, it's almost 40 years ago--
at least 30 years ago, maybe
40 years ago-- collects
Maria Stewart's writings
and publishes them for us.
So it's to say, in
some ways this work has
been going on a very long time.
And as we say, Vanguard
stands on the shoulders
of many, many, many
generations of women.
- I also think of the
churches that you're
talking about as repositories
themselves, right?
Having been, in some ways, the
archives, the political space
for, the secular space
for, the communal space
for so many communities.
I'm thinking of other
historians' work who say,
you know, I went into
the AME Zion Church
and opened this closet.
And there suddenly--
- Absolutely.
Shout out to Dennis Dickerson,
who was, for many years,
the bibliographer
of the AME Church
and invited me to Nashville
to take a seat at the working
table in his office and go
through his personal library.
So there is that, right,
about the story of who
safeguards things and why.
And for Dickerson,
he was-- he is
a historian in his own right.
But he was also the--
safeguarded the
records of the Church.
- Thank you so much, Martha.
I wish we had far more time.
But I encourage everyone to
get their hands on Vanguard.
And Professor Jones has also
been the busiest superstar
of the centennial.
So you can find her talks
and many radio and things
out there in the
blogosphere now that we're
all home and looking for
things to watch since we've all
finished Netflix.
So I will now pass
the floor back over
to Jane Kamensky for
some closing remarks,
and also close
with my own thanks
to Jane for shepherding
this entire project along,
for creating this space
for us to both fund
the creation of new work,
to shepherd an archive that
continues to work
against the grain
so that we can continue to
challenge these stories,
and also for putting on this
conference to try to bring
together people not
usually in dialogue
and bring us together with
the broader community.
So thank you, thank
you, thank you.
Over to Jane.
- Thank you, Martha
and Lisa, both so much
for that reframing beginning,
which I think we'll
carry with us
through the sessions
for the rest of this semester.
I'm particularly grateful
for and humbled, Martha,
by your comments about the
many kinds of institutions
that do the work of collecting
important archives that
can help document broader
stories, and for the need
for an institution
like Schlesinger
to exist in conversation
and in partnership
with those differently
missioned institutions
who have had eyes on where we
had blinders for many decades.
So also important to
think about going forward.
Thank you everybody for being
here today with Lisa and Martha
in this conversation
on origin stories.
I hope you'll be able to
participate in the continuation
of our virtual conference--
Voting Matters,
Gender, Citizenship,
and the Long 19th Amendment.
Please mark your calendar
for the next installment--
Reconstructing the
Polity-- on Thursday,
September 17, at 4:00 PM, where
we'll explore voting rights,
citizenship rights more broadly
in the immediate post-Civil War
period, and in particular
in the wake of the adoption
of the 15th Amendment in 1870.
A full list of all
of the sessions
will appear on
your screen as soon
as I get blanked
out, and can also be
found on Radcliffe's website.
Thank you all and have a
great rest of your afternoon.
Cheers.
