Vanguard

Painting a broad picture of African-American women’s political advocacy and activism, Martha S. Jones presents women fighting for a voice in our political system from the early days of the Republic through women’s suffrage to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Many of the women and their contributions to racial and gender equality were familiar to me. Others less so, including three generations of Jones’s own foremothers who worked for democratic participation in their day. Bringing home how very personal the political is, Jones finds Black women’s politics in parties, elections, government, and beyond. In churches and community institutions, in… show more.

Vanguard traces generations of African American women who strived to close the gap between our democratic ideals and our political and social realities in the United States. Jones begins in the 1820s with Black women who carved out leadership roles in religious and civic organizations and used their platforms to advocate for equality and challenge slavery throughout the antebellum period. In the late 19th century, African American women continued to write, speak, and organize against the violence of racism and sexism that undermined US democracy. Jones’ very readable rendering of this complex history chronicles the many Black women who continued… show more.

I am recommending this exciting, new, comprehensive history of the important role of African American women in the history of women’s rights. All women of color, and most notably African American women, were omitted from original histories of women’s rights, and that omission has carried over into modern histories of the feminist tradition. The author has done a great deal to remedy this problem, telling the stories of individual black women activists and groups of African American women, from the earliest years of women’s rights activism in the 1820s up to and past formal constitutional enfranchisement, from which black women… show more.

What a punch this quiet book packs, in its sweep of Black female freedom fighters over two centuries. Expecting a focus on the civil rights era, I was astonished to encounter such early political disruptors as Mary Ellen Watkins Harper, the only Black woman to speak at the 1866 convention of the American Equal Rights Association; and Maria Stewart, who dared in the early 19th century to call out to formerly enslaved women. Vanguard, inspired by the author’s female ancestors’ brave and lonely fight for civil rights, pulses with deep feeling for unheralded greatness. On the Nineteenth Amendment’s… show more.