Doublespeak: Louisa Jacobs, the American Equal Rights Association, and Complicating Racism in the Early U.S. Women's Suffrage Movement

Abstract

DoublespeakLouisa Jacobs, the American Equal Rights Association, and Complicating Racism in the Early U.S. Women's Suffrage Movement Susan Goodier (bio) 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 Louisa 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. After establishing freedmen's schools in the South during the war, Louisa returned to the North and joined the American Equal Rights Association to promote universal suffrage as a speaker on the lecture circuit. This article, representing preliminary research into the topic, argues that while Black women criticized the women's suffrage movement for perpetuating racism, they maintained ongoing relations with members of the dominant movement as they sought to overcome that racism and win the right for women to vote. Louisa Matilda Jacobs was born to Harriet Jacobs in Edenton, North Carolina, on October 19, 1833. Because her mother had been willed to the daughter of Dr. James Norcom, and children followed the condition of the mother, Louisa, too, was enslaved. Much of the knowledge we have of her is thanks to the extraordinary work of Jean Fagan Yellin, who, back in the 1970s, realized that a slave narrative, long dismissed as a fictional account written by Lydia Maria Child, a white woman, was instead an accurate "historical record" of the life of a woman born enslaved in a community in the South. 1 In addition to editing Incidents and writing a biography of Harriet Jacobs, Yellin has compiled the papers of the [End Page 195] Jacobs family in a two-volume set readily available in many libraries. 2 This article is indebted to and builds on the meticulous research of Yellin. 3 From the time Harriet was fifteen, Norcom demanded she have sexual relations with him. She engaged in a close relationship with another elite member of the white community, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, in an attempt to ward off the attentions of Norcom. She had two children with Sawyer: Joseph, born in 1829, and Louisa Matilda, born four years later. Despite this, Norcom persisted in his attentions. Fiercely determined that Norcom would not have his way with her, in 1835 Harriet went into hiding, spending a total of seven years in an attic space—measuring nine feet by seven feet, and three feet in height—above the woodshed at her grandmother's house. 4 Through tiny openings in the wall of the attic space she watched her children play and grow. Jacobs arranged for Sawyer, a newspaper editor and member of Congress, to purchase Louisa and her brother Joseph to keep Norcom from using them to blackmail her into sexual intercourse. 5 Sawyer also purchased Harriet's brother John, who ran away from Sawyer the next year, eventually making his way to Boston. A poignant passage in Incidents details the one night the mother spent with her daughter during that period, just before the father took her north in the spring of 1839. Apparently, the child had known of her mother's hiding place and deliberately kept in sight of her mother as much as possible. Louisa never told anyone about the hiding place. 6 Sawyer took five-year-old Louisa to Washington to care for her infant half sister; six months later she moved in with relatives of her father in Brooklyn, New York. A Sawyer cousin had proposed adopting Louisa, or at least educating her. Neither plan came to fruition; Louisa seems to have been used by the family as a "waiting-maid." 7 When Louisa's mother Harriet left the hiding place in her grandmother's attic and arrived in New York in the fall of 1842, Harriet found work as a nursemaid in the family of Nathaniel Parker Willis, an author and editor of some note, and rescued...