Women's National Loyal League

• Before the Civil War, the U.S. women's movement was launched by black abolitionists, such as Sojourner Truth, Frances Watkins Harper, Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Sarah Parker Remond, and white abolitionists, such as the Grimké sisters -- Sarah and Angelina -- Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Inspired partly by the egalitarian Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, they challenged male sexual and reproductive violence against female slaves and male domination of the abolitionist movement. The first nationwide feminist group, the Women's National Loyal League, was launched months after the Emancipation Proclamation. It collected 400,000 signatures for nationwide slavery abolition, ushering in the 13th Amendment.
  
  

Division Among Woman Suffragists

• After the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks and women's advocates focused sharply on suffrage, or legal voting rights, and founded the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 to simultaneously defend black and women suffrage. However, in 1869 the group split into the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. The former opposed and the latter endorsed the 14th and 15th amendments, which asserted black male but not woman suffrage. The two factions did not reunite until 1890.
  
  

Ascendancy of Black Feminists

• Under the leadership of the Freedmen's Bureau, coeducational schools for blacks proliferated in the South. There, and in the North, greater educational opportunities gave rise to new generations of black women's rights advocates, who created their own organizations, charitable enterprises and activist movements. At the 1893 World's Congress of Representative Women, Fannie Barrier Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Jackson Coppin, Hallie Quinn Brown, Sarah Jane Woodson Early, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper all testified that education was central to African American women's political future. Among the most famous beneficiaries was the journalist, feminist, and antilynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who attended Shaw, later called Rust, College, a Freedmen's Bureau institution.
  
  

Comstock Law

• The Comstock Law of 1873 prohibited the circulation of "obscene" literature through the U.S. mails. Conflating sex education with pornography and contraception with abortion, it was partly a backlash against the expanding public expression and action of both black and white women's rights supporters over the previous decade. Although strong abortion opponents, many feminists had long defended -- and continued to defend, even at their legal peril -- women's rights to voluntary pregnancy prevention and accurate, plainspoken sex education. The Comstock Act effectively illegalized contraception until the 1936 United States v. One Package lawsuit involving Margaret Sanger.