Mary Church Terrell: “The Progress of Colored Women” 1898

On February 18, 1898, at a meeting of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), Mary Church Terrell delivered an address titled “The Progress of Colored Women.” She states in the address that the occasion marks the fiftieth anniversary of the NAWSA, but this is only partly true. This meeting of the association was held in conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 in New York, which many historians regard as the official start of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States. In part as a result of the Seneca Falls Convention, various suffrage organizations were formed, including the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. The NAWSA in turn had been formed in 1890 as a merger of the two organizations. Terrell, one of the nation’s first African American women to earn a college degree, was active in the NAWSA and numerous other organizations. In 1896, for example, she had cofounded the National Association of College Women, which later became the National Association of University Women, an organization that has continued to this day. That year, too, she was named as the first president of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC). This group, known more simply as the National Association of Colored Women (the name Terrell uses in her address), united the National Federation of Afro-American Women, the Women’s Era Club of Boston, and the Colored Women’s League of Washington, D.C., as well as other groups that had taken part in the African American women’s club movement. Thus, she was eminently qualified to speak about the status of African American women, and her speech was later published as a pamphlet.