All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900

"African American women were not welcomed in many white suffrage parades and organizations, but they were nevertheless critical to the movement. It’s very important to always keep African American women’s stories in the mix. Martha Jones’s book All Bound Up Together is not specifically about black suffragists. African American women’s activism was much broader, addressing the way that African American men and women were treated as second-class citizens. These activists were raising questions about women’s roles and voting in all kinds of places—through churches, through voluntary organizations and through the women’s club movement, especially starting in the 1890s. All Bound Up Together describes an interlocking network in which activists are never just out for women’s issues; activism is always part of what we now call an intersectional vision, which links race, class, and sex. Some suffragists looked at their situation solely through the lens of gender and ignored their class privilege. Black suffragists, starting in 1837 and moving all the way forward, had a much broader vision. This book by Martha Jones adds important dimensions to that history. The women that you mentioned, along with many other suffragists, had approaches that we would call ‘intersectional’ today. They weren’t just thinking about gender; they were thinking about how class affected women’s status, too. You see many examples of this intersectional vision in the suffrage movement. You certainly see it among the African American suffragists. But you are right to point out that some of the more progressive white women had this perspective."