BLOOMERS, SUFFRAGE, and the VOTE !

Amelia Jenks Bloomer was an early suffragist, editor, and social activist. Bloomer was also a fashion advocate who worked to change women’s clothing styles. After meeting activist (and her neighbor) Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Bloomer started to publish articles about the women’s rights movement. The dress reform movement began in 1851 Stanton and Bloomer, began wearing a radical new style of dress first designed by Stanton’s cousin, Elizabeth Smith Miller. It soon became known as the “bloomer outfit” and was worn by many prominent suffragists.

In the 1890s, the bicycle brought about a revolution in women’s fashion and the bloomer outfit became more widely accepted; in 1920, the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote, was ratified.

A sample ballot from the first election in which women could vote

The fear - “masculine” women and “feminine” men!

Black Women in the Suffrage Movement

Black suffragists like Nannie Helen Burroughs wrote and spoke about the need for Black and white women to cooperate to achieve the right to vote. Black women worked with mainstream suffragists and organizations, like the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1913, Ida B. Wells founded the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago, the nation's first Black women's club focused specifically on suffrage.

However, the mainstream organizations did not address the challenges faced by Black women because of their race, such as negative stereotypes, harassment, and unequal access to jobs, housing, and education. So in the late 1800s, Black women formed clubs and organizations where they could focus on the issues that affected them.

The First National Conference of the Colored Women of America was held in Boston in 1895. It was was a three-day conference in Boston organized by Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and included representatives from 42 African-American women's clubs. There, they founded the The National Federation of Afro-American Women. The goal of this organization was to change the image of the black woman, raise the moral standard of the lower class, and cultivate black middle-class women's domestic skills. Their first convention was in Washington D.C. in 1896, where they merged with the National League of Colored Women to form the united National Association of Colored Women (NACW), a precursor to the NAACP. By 1916 the group had more than 100,000 members.

Read the minutes from the first convention HERE.

Nannie Helen Burroughs

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin