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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones Monica L. Mercado (bio) Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All By Martha S. Jones. New York: Basic Books, 2020. 352 pages, illustrations, 6" x 9". $30.00 cloth, $16.99 ebook. If women's history was going to have a moment, 2020 was poised to be it. For years, women's history stakeholders looked forward to that year—now memorable for a global pandemic that disrupted even the best laid plans—to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. With one sentence ("The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex"), US suffragists celebrated victory. Women's right to vote, requiring decades of continued action by women of color and their allies to extend and secure the franchise, has long been the subject of political and social histories. In Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, historian Martha S. Jones rewrites conventional narratives of women's rights in US history by centering the work of Black women, whose expansive politics, by necessity, addressed both sexism and racism. Building on the foundational work of late suffrage historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, and published amid a wave of new books, podcasts, documentaries, museum exhibitions, and public sculpture timed to commemorate the "suffrage centennial," Vanguard is a standout volume that deserves our engagement long after 2020 is in the rearview mirror. But Vanguard is not a book about suffrage and suffragists. Those terms, Jones declares in her introduction, are "far too narrow to capture" the scope of Black women's activism (14). As the vanguard, the women Jones profiles are visionaries and volunteers, interrogating the meaning of freedom and demanding it for themselves and their communities. They joined clubs, churches, and conventions—and, as the endnotes underscore, historians still need to do a better job of acknowledging their contributions. The need for such a volume is clear, and it is personal to Jones, a native New Yorker and Johns Hopkins University professor. Movingly, Vanguard begins with a genealogy. Starting with her great-great-grandmother, Jones briefly unpacks the experiences of her ancestors, introducing us to Black women who "built power where [they] could" even when the vote was denied them (3). Club women, church women, educators, community organizers, fundraisers—each promoted a vision of "winning women's power that would serve all humanity" (8). The introduction lays the groundwork for Jones's argument that woman suffrage was only a small piece of Black women's politics; human rights, not women's rights, [End Page 427] might be a more appropriate term for the vanguard's imaginary in the wake of slavery and emancipation. If the chronological scope of Vanguard feels familiar—beginning around the time of the American Revolution and working its way toward the present—the stories Jones chooses to tell make for a fresh reworking of the history survey genre. There are familiar actors here, of course (Sojourner Truth, Mary Church Terrell), as well as a host of new names (women like Troy, New York, speaker Elizabeth Wicks and New York City businesswoman Hester Lane). Most significantly, Jones maps out Black geographies that rarely intersect with formal suffrage organizing. The 1848 Seneca Falls convention is covered in just a handful of paragraphs, for example, enlarged with a few fascinating hints at the lives of free Black women who lived just a stone's throw from the meeting site. Instead, Vanguard takes seriously the middle decades of the nineteenth century as an era of conventions, plural. Black women attended, spoke up, and even lectured to other women and men at a host of women's rights conventions, colored conventions, and religious meetings. The founding of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) at the turn of the twentieth century solidified many of the networks that Black women forged in this earlier era, and shaped Black politics. "Black men...