Martha S. Jones. Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.

Abstract

Martha Jones’s Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All is an extremely important work. This political history of Black women from the late eighteenth century to the present is sweepingly ambitious and makes arguments both bold and subtle. It is based on a wealth of published and unpublished sources and reveals Jones’s deep knowledge of the nineteenth-century archival terrain and years spent thinking about the history of Black women’s public culture. Vanguard should immediately make gender historians rethink and revise their syllabi. Published to coincide with the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, Jones’ book goes well beyond familiar insights into the racism of mostly white organizations for women’s suffrage. The book offers invaluable details on the limitations of the Nineteenth Amendment and on what Black women did in response to its passage. Vanguard also reframes the subject to treat the fight to vote as only one of Black women’s political campaigns—and by extension, exercising the franchise as only one avenue to exercising power. Jones explores women’s politics within the Black church and the “colored” convention movement as much as she does the more familiar sites such as the abolitionist movement and the early women’s movement. She writes about the Black women’s club movement of the late nineteenth and early and middle twentieth centuries as incubators of political ideas and strategies at times when first all, and then (after 1920) most Black women could not vote.