Person
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin
Courtesy of New York Public Library
A plaque, inconspicuously attached to 103 Charles Street, recognizes the work of a significant Beacon Hill activist from the turn of the 20th century, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin. Mainly a list of accomplishments, its words do not fully capture Ruffin’s "fighting spirit."[1] An activist at heart, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin assumed many public roles throughout her life, from publisher and clubwoman to community leader and national organizer. Called "a woman of rare force of character, mental alertness and of generous impulses" by Booker T. Washington, Ruffin dedicated her life to bettering the lives of women and Black Americans both locally and nationally.[2]
Born in the small Black community of Beacon Hill in 1842, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin grew up surrounded by the abolitionist ideals of justice, equality, and political representation. Her earliest public service dates to the Civil War, during which Ruffin recruited African American men for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts infantry regiments.[3] After the war, Ruffin served on several charities that helped Southern Blacks.[4] In the following decades, Ruffin participated in numerous clubs and service organizations in the Boston area, often skillfully maneuvering between White and Black communities to do so.
The Woman’s Era Club, a club primarily for Black women, was one of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin’s greatest achievements. Established in 1893, the Woman’s Era Club had two purposes: to offer its members opportunities for self-improvement and to address issues that directly affected the African American community, from local politics and education to the debilitating discrimination and terrorism of Black Americans in the South. The club’s corresponding publication, The Woman’s Era, quickly became the nationally recognized voice of Black clubwomen. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and her daughter, Florida Ruffin Ridley, used this publication to bring Black clubwomen to Boston in 1895 for the first National Conference of Colored Women in America.[5]
In her opening address of the conference, Ruffin announced the launch of a new movement, one in which women of color were "coming to the front, willing to join any others in the same work and cordially inviting and welcoming any others to join us."[6] She hoped this conference would encourage Black women to unify under a single organization and "in truth bring a new era to the colored women of America."[7] Ruffin’s dream came true; on the final day of the conference, these clubwomen formed the National Federation of Afro-American Women, which served as a precursor to the National Association of Colored Women.[8] Although Ruffin ultimately did not take significant leadership roles in the following organization, she participated in other regional and local Black women's organizations, such as the Northeastern Federation of Women's Clubs and, later, the League of Women for Community Service.
In addition to laying the foundation for the Black clubwomen's movement, Josephine Ruffin supported the local suffrage movement. While women’s suffrage was not the only cause that caught Ruffin’s eye, she undoubtedly saw suffrage as a step towards greater equality. Ruffin looked up to the Boston abolitionists and women’s rights activists, including Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, who welcomed her into the movement because they "were broad enough to include 'no distinction because of race' with 'no distinction because of sex.'"[9] Through their encouragement, Ruffin joined and accepted leadership positions in local and national suffrage organizations, many of which were dominated by White women, including the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association (MWSA), and the Massachusetts School Suffrage Association (MSSA).[10] In these roles, she unflinchingly criticized New England for its hypocritical claims of celebrating liberty and equality: "It is my belief that the sentiment of New England favors 'all rights for all,' except the ballot for women."[11]
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin particularly encouraged suffrage in Boston’s African American communities. With the MWSA, Ruffin led an organized effort in 1885 to reach out to men and women in the Beacon Hill and West End neighborhoods, which were home to Boston’s African American community. In the months leading to the election, Ruffin helped organize meetings at churches and private homes on Beacon Hill. During these events local leaders, including William Lloyd Garrison, Archibald Grimke, Lucy Stone, and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin herself, spoke in favor of women’s suffrage. They encouraged women to register to vote in school elections (a right Massachusetts women had won in 1879[12]), and men to vote for a Ward 9 representative who supported municipal suffrage for women.[13] In 1887, Ruffin helped establish the West End Suffrage League (an affiliate of the MWSA), and served as its first president. Other local Black leaders comprised the club’s 45 founding members, including former state representative Lewis Hayden and religious activist Eliza Gardner.[14] The League’s motto, "All rights for all," reflected the community’s belief in equality across both race and sex.[15]
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin’s distinct voice on the suffrage movement’s intersection with race most clearly came through in her editorial in the 1915 special suffrage edition of the NAACP journal The Crisis. Proudly announcing her dedication to "suffrage work in Massachusetts for forty years and more," Ruffin called on African Americans to support suffrage.[16] Like many of her contemporary activists who had lived through abolition, Ruffin saw the connections between the plight of women and that of African Americans. As a Black woman, she inherently felt the responsibility to fight against the many forms of injustice on both fronts. For her, women’s suffrage served as a stepping stone to more expansive civil rights: "We are justified in believing that the success of this movement for equality of the sexes means more progress toward equality of the races."[17]
Footnotes
[1] "Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin,” Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, ed. Hallie Quinn Brown (Xenia, Ohio: The Aldine Publishing Company, 1926): 151-153.
[2] Booker Washington, A New Negro for a New Century: An accurate and up-to-date record of the upward struggles of the Negro Race (Chicago: American Publishing House, 1900), 390-392.
[3] Maude Jenkins, “She Issued the Call: Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin.” Sage 5, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 74-76; “Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin,” Homespun Heroines, ed. Hallie Quinn Brown.
[4] This included the Kansas Relief Association and the Association for the Promotion of Child Training in the South. See “Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin,” Sketches of Representative Women of New England, ed. Julia Ward Howe (Boston: New England Historical Publishing Company, 1904): 335-339.
[5] See The Woman’s Era 2, no. 5 (August 1895).
[6] "Address of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, President of Conference," The Woman’s Era 2, no. 5 (August 1895).
[7] "Address of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin," The Woman’s Era 2, no. 5 (August 1895).
[8] "Minutes of the First National Conference of Colored Women," The Woman’s Era 2, no. 5 (August 1895); “To the Women of the Country,” The Woman’s Era 2, no. 5 (August 1895); Jenkins, “She Issued the Call,” 75.
[9] Teresa Blue Holden, “‘Earnest Women Can Do Anything:’ The Public Career of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, 1842-1904,” (Phd dissertation, Saint Louis University, 2005); Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, “Trust the Women!” The Crisis 10, no. 4 (August 1915).
[10] Holden, “‘Earnest Women Can Do Anything;’”112; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998).
[11] Mrs. George L. Ruffin,” Boston Globe, March 4, 1894.
[12] Barbara Berenson, Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2018), 74.
[13] The Woman’s Journal 16, no. 37 (September 12, 1885), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, accessed January 10, 2020, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:49020442$295i; “School Suffrage in Boston,” The Woman’s Journal 16, no. 39 (September 26, 1885), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, accessed January 10, 2020, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:49020442$314i; “Suffrage Meeting in Ward Nine,” The Woman’s Journal 16, no. 40 (October 3, 1885), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, accessed January 10, 2020,https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:49020442$322i; “Massachusetts Field Notes,” The Woman’s Journal 16, no. 44 (October 31, 1885), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, accessed January 10, 2020,https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:49020442$354i.
[14] “West End Woman Suffrage League,” The Woman’s Journal 18, no. 33 (August 20, 1887), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, accessed January 10, 2020, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:49687853$274i.
[15] “West End Woman Suffrage League,” The Woman’s Journal 18, no. 44 (November 5, 1887), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, accessed January 10, 2020,https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:49687853$366i
[16] Ruffin, “Trust the Women!”
[17] Ruffin, “Trust the Women!”