Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke

Abstract

We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritisms, whether of sex, race, country, or condition. If one link of the chain be broken, the chain is broken. ... We want, then, as toilers for the universal triumph of justice and human rights, to go to our homes from this Congress, demanding an entrance not through a gateway for ourselves, our race, our sex, or our sect, but a grand highway for humanity. The colored woman feels that woman's cause is one and universal; and that not till ... race, color, sex, and condition are seen as the accidents, and not the substance of life; . . . not till then is woman's lesson taught and woman's cause won-not the white woman's, nor the black woman's, nor the red woman's, but the cause of every man and of every woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong. Woman's wrongs are thus indissolubly linked with all undefended woe, and the acquirement of her "rights" will mean the final triumph of all right over might, the supremacy of the moral forces of reason, and justice, and love in the government of the nations of earth.8 7 Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, "Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English," Signs 11, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 63-80. 8 May Wright Sewall, ed., World's Congress of Representative Women (Chicago, 1893), 715, quoted in Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin, eds., Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings