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Conclusion Feminist Affiliations in a Divisive Climate: Anna Julia Cooper’s “Woman versus the Indian” “It is not the intelligent woman vs. the ignorant woman; nor the white woman vs. the black, the brown, and the red,—it is not even the cause of woman vs. man. Nay, ’tis woman’s strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice. . . . Hers is every interest that has lacked an interpreter and a defender. Her cause is linked with that of every agony that has been dumb—every wrong that needs a voice,” wrote Anna Julia Cooper in late 1891 in her essay “Woman versus the Indian” (Cooper, “Woman” 107). An educator, activist for the poor, leader in the social settlement movement and the black women’s club movement, and a journalist, Cooper had taken up what she believed to be a low point in the fight for woman suffrage that saw the rights of “woman” pitted against those of “the Negro” and “the Indian” at the National Council of Women’s first triennial meeting in Washington, D.C., held February 22–25, 1891. Women attending the council’s meeting heard addresses ranging from the control and care of “Vicious and Dependent Classes” to charities, social purity, “dependent races,” women in the church and missionary work, temperance , women’s education and employment, suffrage, and women’s clubs and associations. While the meeting’s agenda lists a range of causes and locations for women’s political participation that, it is important to note, also informed the political complexity of black feminisms, the National Council of Women was dominated by white women whose racism had or would soon be called into question by black feminists such as Sojourner Truth, Frances Harper, Ida B. Wells, and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin. The 1891 meeting was the site of just such conflicts and the venue, effectively, for legitimating expediency arguments and conservative, exclusionary strategies that would be employed by the newly reunited (white) woman suffrage movement in its efforts to win over women from the South to the movement. Anna Howard Shaw, the “queen” of the suffrage platform and later president of the National 226 Feminist Affiliations in a Divisive Climate American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), gave an address titled “Women vs Indians” in which she denounced the recent enfranchisement of Native Americans in South Dakota at the ostensible expense of “eminent [white] women,” such as NAWSA’s own Susan B. Anthony (HWS 4: 182). At this same gathering, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, one of the greats of black feminism and apparently the only black woman to take the platform, also spoke as part of a panel asked to address woman’s “Duty to Dependent Races.” In this speech, given at a time when lynching was at an all-time high, Harper asserted the claim of “the negro” upon the nation, contending that African Americans were no “dependant race” but worthy citizens deserving of justice and protection from the violent tyranny of the lynch mob. By implication , Harper’s silence on “the Indian” seemingly positioned Native Americans as, indeed, one of the “dependent races” of her panel’s title with a lesser claim on the franchise and its promised protections than “the negro” could assert. Focusing on that panel, “Duty to Dependent Races,” Shaw’s speech, and Cooper’s essay, this conclusion draws out several important threads in this study of early black feminism and its publics in order to remind us of those central considerations we have seen black feminists working with throughout the century even as we turn our attention to a crucial moment in the overlapping and competing of feminist publics. The expediency arguments of the (white) woman suffrage movement in the early 1890s made rather specific demands of black feminists, even as they created what some would see as opportunities for forging new publics and coalitions. The positions two very different figures like Frances Harper and Anna Julia Cooper took are instructive not only for the picture of black feminism at the century’s close they offer us but also for our understanding of what challenges certain politics and appeals continue to present to the histories of early black feminism we create. A complex picture of black feminism near the close of the nineteenth century emerges from Anna Julia Cooper’s response to Shaw’s and Harper’s National Council of Women addresses in her essay “Woman versus the Indian.” Likely in attendance at the council meetings, Cooper saw these...

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