Doublespeak: Louisa Jacobs, the American Equal Rights Association, and Complicating Racism in the Early US Women’s Suffrage Movement

Members of the US women’s suffrage movement faced many struggles related to race right from the inception of the movement. A focus on Louisa Jacobs, born in 1833 to the enslaved Harriet Jacobs (author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) helps us to unpack racial cooperation—and its lack—in the years following the Civil War. Jacobs came to the North as a child and eventually found herself living in social justice activist communities. After establishing freedmen’s schools in the South during the war, she returned to the North and joined the American Equal Rights Association as a speaker on the lecture circuit. Promoting universal suffrage from the podium across the state of New York with the likes of Charles Lenox Rémond, Olympia Brown, Susan B. Anthony, Parker Pillsbury, and Bessie Bisbee, her arguments held sway with her audiences.

Yet, as Jacobs listened to the sometimes hypocritical remarks of her white colleagues as they all faced both rural and urban audiences in the cause of universal suffrage, she became disillusioned and by 1867 had withdrawn from the lecture circuit. Charlotte Forten Grimké, teacher and social activist and a friend of Jacobs, condemned the racism of the suffrage movement, observing that it “strengthen[ed] a most unjust and cruel prejudice.” Yet, not only did Louisa Jacobs attend the National Woman Suffrage Association Convention in Washington, DC in 1886, she distributed their pamphlets. This paper argues that while black women held the women’s suffrage movement in contempt for perpetuating racism, they consistently sought to overcome it by maintaining relations with the dominant movement.