Nannie Helen Burroughs and the Descendants of Miriam: Rewriting Nannie Helen Burroughs into First Wave Feminism

Abstract

We argue that early twentieth century Black women labor organizers and their movement for inclusive women’s suffrage and women’s labor rights stay absent from popular first wave feminist narratives. After the ratification of the nineteenth amendment, Black women continued organizing for women’s suffrage and labor rights in the face of racial and gender-based policies that legalized the labor exploitation of Black women and the suppression of the Black vote. We detail African American educator Nannie Helen Burroughs’s labor and voting initiatives to challenge the white women-centered chronology of first wave feminism and expand its narrative to include Black women’s labor organizing both at home and abroad. While working with women’s suffrage organizations, Burroughs established the National Trade School for Women and Girls in 1909 to improve the working conditions of Black domestic workers and create career opportunities that had been denied to them because of discriminatory hiring practices and intersecting racial and gender inequalities. In 1921, Burroughs co-founded the National Association of Wage Earners, a national union organizing effort for Black women. While piecing together her groundbreaking initiatives from archives, obituaries, newspaper articles, speeches, secondary literature, event notices, and the biographies of her co-organizers, we assert that her story sheds new light on the rarely acknowledged connection between Black women’s labor and political organizing in the United States and abroad, drawing attention to the often-marginalized histories of Black domestic worker organizing in feminist historical narratives. We intend for this historical uncovering of Burroughs writings to begin the conversation about who she was as a national and international labor organizer.

We argue that Nannie Helen Burroughs (1870-1961) was a significant labor leader and rhetorician of the early twentieth century. We challenge racial, gendered and classed constructions of history and rhetoric that render invisible the work women like Burroughs did during nadir. She believed a women’s labor collective would lead to political, social, and economic rights for the entire Black community. We examine how Burroughs employed her audacious, progressive, and forward-thinking labor rhetoric through an analysis of three major texts: “The Colored Woman and Her Relations to the Domestic Service Problem” (1902), “Divide Vote or Go to Socialists” (1919) and “My Dear Friend” (1921). Through these three texts we trace the development of Burroughs’s womanist labor rhetoric over time. We argue that following her speeches, Burroughs developed and employed a labor rhetoric that led to the formation of a historic labor union for African American domestic workers in 1921, the National Association of Wage Earners (NAWE). We intend for our examination of her writings to commence rather than end a discussion about who Burroughs was as a labor organizer and rhetorician seeking to complicate the legacy of Burroughs. She was a scholar first who sought to liberate black women from penury by asserting their humanity through offering a broad educational focus, instilling pride within her students’ gender and race, and placing these women into positions of stable employment through a womanist themed national labor and unionization platform.