History
Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony proposed the idea at an American Anti-Slavery Society meeting in Boston in January 1866. Stone had been involved with abolitionism through the American Anti-Slavery Society for 18 years, and had shifted her energies mainly to women's rights issues. Anthony's focus was primarily women's suffrage. The goal was to unite the energies of the two movements and focus on the common goal of universal suffrage. Anthony, Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass founded the group.
Three weeks prior to the first AERA meeting, on May 10, 1866 in New York City, the eleventh National Women's Rights Convention was called to order by Stanton. A stirring speech against racial discrimination was given by African-American activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, in which she said "...You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs. I, as a colored woman, have had in this country an education which has made me feel as if I were in the situation of Ishmael, my hand against every man, and every man's hand against me..." Anthony and Stanton had begun to be perceived by some as elitist or racist, as being less concerned with the underprivileged.
Read more about this topic: American Equal Rights Association
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten.”
—Erma Brombeck (20th century)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)