American Equal Rights Association - Significance

Significance

The brief existence and ultimate failure of the AERA is significant, as it marks the separation of the women's and black rights movements after their successful collaboration in abolitionism before and during the Civil War. In the immediate aftermath of the AERA, woman suffrage activists founded two competing groups. Stanton, Anthony, and other former abolitionists created the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in a meeting two days after the AERA convention. The all-female NWSA did not involve the issue of race in its mission. Those who believed that black and women’s suffrage were not mutually exclusive, including Lucy Stone, formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). Its members continued to work for equal rights for both races and sexes, in the more traditional vein of the abolitionist movement. The impasse between the two groups continued for twenty years, until they combined as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890. NAWSA was guided much more strongly by NWSA'a brand of women’s suffrage than Stone and Harper’s, partly in response to the progress toward parity in voting rights for black men after the passage and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the issue of race was less emphasized in popular American feminism until the mid-20th century.