Born in Boston, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (1842-1924) grew up in a family of fighters for justice, her father a leader in the Black community. So, it is not surprising that she devoted herself to bettering the standing and power of 19th century black women throughout her life.
As a young, newly married woman, she and her husband, the first black graduate of Harvard Law School, resettled in Liverpool, England to protest the Dred Scott decision, which solidified slavery in the United States. They returned at the start of the American Civil War to speak out for abolition and to recruit black men to serve in the 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments.
Following the war, Josephine Ruffin was a member of several groups that helped the freed slaves in the South. One group she founded supported the establishment of kindergarten programs.
After the war, she worked as a journalist for the black newspaper The Courant, and became active in the women’s suffrage movement. Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe invited her to join the New England Women’s Club, where she was the first black member.
At the time, most women’s clubs, which advocated for suffrage and women’s rights, were made up of white women. In 1893, she, with her daughter Florida Ruffin Ripley and educator Marie Loise Baldwin, established the Women’s Era Club.
Josephine Ruffin served as editor of the club’s newspaper The Women’s Era.
The following excerpt is from the text of the address Ruffin gave to the First National Congress of Colored Women as reprinted in the Women’s Era, vol. 2 August 1895 13-15.
The reasons why we should confer are so apparent that it would seem hardly necessary to enumerate them, and yet there is none of them but demand our serious consideration. In the first place we need to feel the cheer and inspiration of meeting each other; we need to gain the courage and fresh life that comes from the mingling of congenial souls, of those working for the same ends. Next we need to talk over not only those things which are of vital importance to us as women, but also the things that are of special interest to us as colored women, the training of our children, openings for boys and girls, how they can be prepared for occupations and occupations may be found or opened for them, what we especially can do in the moral education of the race with which we are identified, our mental elevation and physical development, the home training it is necessary to give our children in order to prepare them to meet the peculiar conditions in which they shall find themselves, how to make the most of our own, to some extent, limited opportunities, these are some of our own peculiar questions to be discussed. Besides these are the general questions of the day, which we cannot afford to be indifferent to: temperance, morality, the higher education, hygiene and domestic questions. If these things need the serious consideration of women more advantageously placed by reason of all the aid to right thinking and living with which they are surrounded, surely we, with everything to pull us back, to hinder us in developing, need to take every opportunity and means for the thoughtful consideration which shall lead to wise action.
Read the whole speech here.
Josephine Ruffin’s Work
The Women’s Era. 3 volumes (Digitalized)
More about Josephine Ruffin
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin National Park Service
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, A Pioneer in the Black Women’s Club Movement by Anthony W. Neal The Bay State Banner
(1895) Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, “Address to the First National Conference of Colored Women” BlackPast
“If laws are unjust, they must be continually broken until they are altered.”
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin