Former Congresswoman Liz Cheney’s (R-WY) decision to back Vice President Kamala Harris for President is not only smart and necessary, it’s an alliance that gives women a second chance to fulfill what began almost 200 years ago when, quiet as it’s kept, Black women founded the women’s movement and white women joined them.
While the first Women’s Rights Convention may have been held in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848, the true birthdate of the movement began much earlier and nearly 300 miles away — by Black women in Philadelphia in Sept 1831.
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Sarah Mapps Douglass, a 25-year-old teacher and artist, issued the call as she and her mother, Grace Bustill Douglass, welcomed family and friends to their home. That Saturday, they could not have known how profoundly they would redirect history on two fronts in one day.
Craving a “mental feast,” this was their inaugural banquet. By day’s end, they’d founded the Female Literary Association of Philadelphia (FLA) — thought to be the first book club in the nation. By year’s end, they’d changed the world.
Along with Mapps Douglass and her mother, the group included Charlotte Forten and her daughters Sarah, Margaretta, and Harriet.
Who were these women? They were members of Philadelphia’s Black elite. Each woman knew privilege. They also knew America as a slavocracy and a threat to every person of color, enslaved and semi-free alike.
In Virginia, just weeks before the FLA’s first meeting, Nat Turner’s slave rebellion set pro-slavers and their sympathizers reeling. Quaker-led Pennsylvania, once a haven to freedom-seekers, went from banning slave catchers to banning Black people. Enslaving people wasn’t the primary problem; Black people resisting enslavement was the problem — a contortion of logic that persists. Laws were drafted to “prohibit the emigration of negroes and mulattoes in this commonwealth” and require any African American entering the state to post a $500 bond (equivalent today to more than $11,000).
In words that continue to resonate, Mapps Douglass spoke for her literary association cofounders: “One short year ago, how different were my feelings on the subject of slavery! But how was the scene changed when I beheld the oppressor lurking on the border of my own peaceful home! I saw his iron hand stretched forth to seize me as his prey, and the cause of the slave became my own. Has not this been your experience, my sisters?”
Before, their relative privilege afforded these women a semblance of protection. No longer. Their very existence was viewed as a threat by the white male establishment, which makes their next move even more impressive.
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On Sept. 20, 1831, for their second mental feast, having drafted the Female Literary Association constitution, they adopted and mailed it to William Lloyd Garrison ― ardent abolitionist, publisher of The Liberator ― for printing.
“PREAMBLE: Conscious that among the various pursuits that have engaged the attention of mankind in the different eras of the world…; it therefore becomes a duty incumbent upon us as women… as daughters of a despised race… to cultivate the talents entrusted to our keeping, that by so doing, we may break down the strong barrier of prejudice.”
Turning pain to purpose, Mapps Douglass wrote to Garrison: “Our design in wishing [our constitution] published was that our sisters of other cities might be induced from our example to form similar associations.” Induced they were. Black women determined themselves capable of moving from where they were — beings constricted by racist, sexist manmade laws of subjugation — to where they wanted to go: people “entrusted” with “talents” for the greater good by Nature’s universal laws.
Their constitution, printed in The Liberator’s Dec. 3, 1831, edition, launched a movement of the many. A human rights movement ― the women’s movement. Surprised?
As traditionally told, the story begins in London, 1840. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, mothers of the movement, meet at the first World Anti-Slavery Convention. There they sit, humiliated and segregated behind a curtain in a remote gallery, as their husbands enter the main hall, cloaked in sexist privilege, to opine on world events. So begins their eight-year battle to wrestle sexism to the floor of Wesleyan Chapel at Seneca Falls where, ironically, the most outspoken advocate for women’s political rights is a Black man — self-emancipated ex-slave, abolitionist, Underground Railroad conductor Frederick Douglass. His impassioned plea adds women’s suffrage to the convention’s Declaration of Sentiments — since revered as the founding document of the movement.
Missing: our Black foremothers. Erased: the Haudenosaunee Confederacy of nations indigenous to upstate New York whose democracy inspired the structure of our own. Among them: the matrilineal Seneca, as in Seneca Falls. Certainly, they yet have much to teach about power-sharing between the sexes.
In the great scheme of things, to be sure, one might ask what difference it makes who did what first. Why, then, has it been an historical imperative that certain people always be relegated second? Who decides history? What don’t we know and why?
As far as chronological fact and impact, the Female Literary Association of Philadelphia constitution written by Black women in 1831 stands foundational. Within weeks of its publication, the African-American Female Intelligence Society of Boston followed suit; their constitution was published in The Liberator on Jan. 7, 1832. Feb. 22, 1832 brought the first abolitionist assembly of Black women — the Female Anti-Slavery Society, founded in Salem, Mass. On Sept. 21, 1832, Maria Stewart walked to the footlights of Boston’s Franklin Hall and into the glare of public debate as the first American woman to lecture in public.
“O, ye daughters of Africa, awake! arise!” she rallied. “How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?” Her call-to-action reverberated across the racial divide. In 1833, Female Literary Association members launched a Philadelphia-based Female Anti-Slavery Society, their movement attracting white allies. Among them, Lucretia Mott — seven years before London, 15 years before Seneca Falls. Here begins the political voice of women, Black and white, rising in concert.
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With “amalgamation” (“race-mixing”) and slavery then as corrosive as the “culture wars” now, friendships and alliances were built and broken, families divided, marriages fractured, along that societal Mason-Dixon Line.
White men demanded white women bar Black women from their meetings — meetings convened by Black women on the fate of Black people. White women refused.
Warnings escalated into threats. White male outrage percolated to a boil.
On May 17, 1838, four days into its opening ceremonies, Pennsylvania Hall — the state-of-the-art pride of the city built as a forum for human rights concerns —ushered in the first Female Anti-Slavery Convention. Mobs emboldened by the blind eye of law enforcement torched the scene with the women inside narrowly escaping. As fire truck hoses were deliberately diverted, Pennsylvania Hall burned to the ground.
One month later to the day, Mott wrote her son-in-law:
“Our proceedings… have greatly aroused our pseudo-abolitionists [who have] left no means untried to induce us to expunge from our minutes a resolution relating to social intercourse with our colored brethren.”
Within 10 years, no Black women were invited to the 1848 Seneca Falls convention and none attended.
What if American women had remained allies in defiance of racism and political violence? Would it have taken 90 years to go from Philadelphia to passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and women’s suffrage in 1920? 135 years to the Voting Rights Act and universal suffrage in 1965? 193 years to arrive at this moment when, inspired by #WinWithBlackWomen, more than 100 grassroots organizations have broken barriers of race, gender, and party to act in their own best interests and #Unite4America?
How much more are we willing to sacrifice to find out, weakening fundamental rights for all in favor of power for some and thwarting change that could have been long ago won through solidarity?
Come Nov. 5, when millions of people go to the polls, will women again succumb to racist/sexist taunts that would have us wait another 200 years? Or, will we break the blockade on women empowered and vote in our own best interests to elect Kamala Harris as the first female president of the United States?
Those who would suppress history, safeguarding status quo racism and sexism, divide and conquer at our collective peril. Depriving us of our past and our wounds, denies us our struggles, triumphs, and imagination ― the very lifeblood of possibility that makes us human, whole, and brave.
Case in point: founding the women’s movement.
Janus Adams is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, historian, and author of “SISTER DAYS: 365 Inspired Moments in African American Women’s History.” Host of public radio’s “The Janus Adams Show” and podcast, she is also founder of The Institute for History and Healing, Inc.
This post first appeared at the New York Amsterdam News