Born in Boston’s Beacon Hill community, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (1842–1924) grew up learning from people with abolitionist ideals of justice, equality and political representation. Her mother was English-born, and her father, from the Caribbean Island of Martinique, founded the Boston Zion Church.
   Young Josephine received her early education in Salem, Mass., where the schools were integrated. By age 16, she’d met and married George Lewis Ruffin, the first African American to graduate from Harvard Law School and serve on both the Boston City Council and in the state Legislature. He later became Boston’s first Black municipal judge.
   After her marriage, Ruffin graduated from a Boston finishing school and subsequently completed two years of private tutoring in New York. She fought against slavery, recruited African-American soldiers to fight for the North in the Civil War. During the Civil War years (1861–1865), the couple became involved in charity works and civil rights causes. Ruffin developed a passion for the advancement of Black women and the women’s suffrage movement and began to work closely with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
    Ruffin served as the first vice president of the National Association of Colored Women and helped found the Boston chapter of the NAACP. She served as editor of the Women’s Era (1890–1897), the first newspaper published by and for African-American women.

    But Ruffin wanted to take the movement beyond the pages of a paper; she wanted to expand the paper and its purpose into an organization. Women’s voices needed to be brought to the forefront for social and political change.
   In 1894, Ruffin and her daughter, Florida Ridely, along with Maria Baldwin, a Boston school principal, and 20 other Black women from Boston founded the Woman’s Era Club (1893), a civic association for African-American women.

   Suffrage was not the club’s only goal though its members did actively engage in the suffrage movement and participate in suffrage-related events. They also joined local organizations and published articles in support of the suffrage cause. Being a member provided Black women opportunities for both self-improvement and to discuss topics of interest specific to their gender and race.
     For Ruffin, women’s suffrage served as a stepping stone to more expansive civil rights: “We are justified in believing that the success of this movement for equality of the sexes means more progress toward equality of the races.”

   The Women’s Era Club, one of Ruffin’s greatest achievements, later disbanded. Topics from local politics and education to the debilitating discrimination and terrorism of Black Americans in the South had been quieted but not silenced. Ruffin remained active, later becoming one of the founding members of the Boston NAACP (1910). Ruffin died in Boston in 1924.

Mia Lane

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