American Equal Rights Association

The American Equal Rights Association (also known as the Equal Rights Association) was an organization formed by women's rights and black rights activists in 1866 in the United States. Its goal was to join the cause of sexual equality with that of racial equality. Tensions between the movements about women's suffrage caused the AERA to split apart in 1869.

History

The attempted fusion of the 2 movements was both a nod to women’s participation in abolitionism and an acknowledgement of the importance of the demand for equal rights, particularly suffrage. Its founders were active in both the black and women’s rights movements of the mid-nineteenth century: Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony proposed the idea at a Boston anti-slavery meeting in January 1866, and within the next few months Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frederick Douglass had founded the group. The top leadership consisted of prominent figures involved in both movements. The goal was to unite the energies of the two movements and focus it towards the common goal of universal suffrage.

Over the course of the next few years, the debates between feminists and black rights activists focused on two of the fundamental disagreements between the two movements. The first was the dependability of the political establishment, especially political parties. Feminist groups moved away from the Republican Party and in fact the entire political party system, while the black rights movement aligned itself even more closely. The second issue was based on differences over the understanding of the function and necessity of suffrage. By 1869, each movement no longer respected the other’s legitimacy. Much of the women’s suffrage leadership considered that the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution accomplished the goal of black male suffrage at the expense of a combined amendment that would have provided universal suffrage, and few black activists could ignore the important demands made on their energies by the critical needs of the post-Civil War community of former slaves. The American Equal Rights Association disbanded in 1869; no large-scale effort to fuse the causes of black and women's civil rights activism took place for another two decades.

ignificance

The brief existence and ultimate failure of the AERA is significant, as it marks the separation of of race in its mission. Those who believed that black and women’s suffrage were not members continued to work for equal rights for both races and sexes, in the more traditional vein of the abolitionist movement. The impasse between the two groups continued for twenty years, until they combined as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890. NAWSA was guided much more strongly by NWSA'a brand of women’s suffrage than Stone and Harper’s, partly in response to the progress toward parity in voting rights for black men after the passage and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the issue of race was less emphasized in popular American feminism until the mid-20th century.

ee also

*Lucretia Mott
*National American Woman Suffrage Association
*Women's Suffrage
*National Woman's Suffrage Association
*History of women's suffrage in the United States
*Voting rights in the United States

References

*Baker, Paula. “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920.” In "Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History," eds Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, 66-91. New York: Routledge, 1990.
*DuBois, Ellen Carol. "Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848-1869." Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.
*Giddings, Paula. "When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America." New York: William Morrow and Co., 1984.