Ruffin's writing was instrumental in starting clubs for black women. The club movement was designed to help black women communicate with each other, learn about black women's achievments, and to fight for women's rights. Ruffin founded a national newspaper called the Women's Era to help black women become more influential in society.
Ruffin was a strong, intelligent woman who did everything for her newspaper. She edited, wrote for, and published it, and she sold advertisements and designed the pages. The Women's Era contained news about the struggle for women's rights from all over the country. Ruffin thought women had been ignored for too long, and stayed at home when they should have also been out fighting for the women's movement. She hoped that if women realized they had many talents besides being wives and mothers, and learned about what women across the country were doing, more of them would join the fight. She also wrote about racial issues like segregation, and thought that laws that were racist and sexist should be broken. She supported Ida Wells-Barnett's anti-lynching campaigns.
In 1895, Ruffin coordinated the first national convention of black women's clubs. While many people praised her accomplishments, she was not allowed into clubs made up of white women, and physically fought for desegregation at a national convention for women's clubs. Ruffin also started the Women's Era Club, which provided scholarships for young black women, founded the Association for Child Training in the South, and served on the executive board of the Massachusetts Federation of Women's Clubs.
While Ruffin wrote about and spoke out for women's rights, she often found that white women didn't want to fight for the rights of black women. Although feminists today try to fight for women of all colors, non-white women often have to struggle twice as hard - against sexism and racism. What are the similarities and differences between feminists of different racial backgrounds? For example, do Native American women fight for the same issues as Latinas? Native American women often get really poor health care on reservations, so they may fight for adequate medical treatment, while other feminists might not know about it at all. Latinas often live in poverty, so they may focus on welfare issues because it affects them directly. See if you can find information on what issues women of different races fight for, and how they're alike and different.