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

Abstract

Members of the U.S. women’s suffrage movement, usually noted as being from the 1840s to the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, faced many struggles related to race from the outset. Periods of close collaboration between Black and white activists have been punctuated by longer periods with virtually no cooperation between them. Turning our attention to Lou- isa Jacobs, the daughter of the once-enslaved Harriet Jacobs (author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), helps us unpack racial cooperation—and the lack thereof—in the years immediately following the Civil War.