From Jarena Lee to Stacey Abrams, Martha S. In that way she is as bold and necessary to our understanding of ourselves as the women in this important work.” -Tressie McMillan Cottom, author of Thick: And Other Essays.īold, ambitious, and beautifully crafted, Vanguard represents more than two hundred years of Black women’s political history. Vanguard brilliantly lays bare how a full accounting of black women as powerful political actors is both past and prologue. Martha Jones has given us a gift we do not deserve.
“You cannot tell the history of modern democracy without the history of Black women, and vibrating through Martha Jones’s prose, argument, and evidence is analysis that takes Black women seriously. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of black women - Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more - who were the vanguard of women’s rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. Vanguard is a new history of African American women’s political lives in America. Securing their rights required a movement of their own.
But this overwhelmingly white women’s movement did not win the vote for most black women. In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
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