War ended in 1918, black women found themselves in desperate straits economically given their loss of jobs after the men returned home from Europe. Nannie Burroughsâs concern for the plight of black working-class women, particularly domestic servants, resulted in her organizing the National Association of Wage Earners, in 1920. Her intense feelings of racial pride were also manifested in her rejection of white standards of beauty, and she accused her sisters of âcolor phobiaâ if they used hair straighteners and skin bleachers. After the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1919, she worked with the NACW to mobilize black women voters and in 1924 became president of the National League of Republican Colored Women.
During this same period, the International Council of Women of the
Darker Races (which sometimes met in Washington, D.C., at Nannie Burroughsâs school) was spawned by the racial uplift impulses and the international educational projects of the black womenâs club movement. Organized by several club women in 1924, most notably Margaret Murray Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Womanâs Club and President of NACW from 1914-1918, its purpose was to study the history of peoples of color throughout the world and disseminate knowledge about them for the purpose of engendering racial pride. Study groups, which were called Committees of Seven, were also formed to infuse public school curricula with material on blacks (a precursor of Black Studies) and other people of color and field trips were organized to gain firsthand experience of other cultures.
The council also studied the situation of women and children of color internationally. Like Cooper, who mentioned Muslim harems and the Chinese practice of foot binding on the first page of A Voice from the South, council members were aware of the differential experiences of women because of their travel to international conferences. Washington taught a course at Tuskegee Institute on the condition and status of women throughout the world. The Pan-African Congress, which stressed the unity of all African peoples, was organized in 1919 in Paris by William E. B. Du Bois, a strong supporter of black womenâs liberation. Cooper, who spoke on âThe Negro Problem in America,â was one of only two black women to address this international gathering of people of African descent. The council also cosponsored with the Chicago Womenâs Club a fund-raising activity to support Pan-Africanist feminist Adelaide Casely-Hayfordâs efforts to build a school in Sierra Leone. She was married to a prominent Ghanaian lawyer who edited Gold Coast Leader, a leading Pan-Africanist publication. This work of the council is reminiscent of more recent attempts by black feminist activists to learn about and establish linkages with women of color internationally and to struggle for the elimination of sexism and racism globally. In 1960, for example, African American women attended the First Conference of African Women and Women of African Descent held in Accra, Ghana, in July 1960.
A frequently overlooked aspect of black womenâs activism during this period, especially within the context of Pan-Africanism or nationalism, was their battle against gender oppression, though black liberation would be their major priority. In 1925, Elise McDougald, Harlem teacher and journalist, discussed the economic plight of a particular class of African American Women. She also acknowledged that black womenâs âfeminist efforts are directed chiefly toward the realization of the equality of the races, the sex struggle assuming a subordinate placeâ (McDougald, âThe Double Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipationâ Survey Graphic L111 [October 1924âMarch 1925].) This granting of greater
urgency to racial concerns was predictable given the pervasiveness of white supremacy.
The feminist-Pan-Africanist views of Amy Jacques Garvey