"Josephine St.Pierre Ruffin" (August 31 1842- March 13 1924)

Activists, suffragist.Josephine was born in Boston, Massachusetts,the youngest of six children of John St. Pierre and Elizabeth Matilda St. Pierre,a native of Cornwall England.Her father was the

son of Jean Jacques St. Pierre, a French immigrant from Martinique, who married Betsey. Hill, a descendant of an African who settled among Native Americans near Tauton, Massachusetts.John St. Pierre was a shop-owner who sold new and used clothing. He was a founder of the Zion Church in Boston.She attended public schools in Charleston and Salem,a private school in New York, and later Bowdoin, a finishing school for girls in Boston. In 1858, at the age of sixteen she married George Lewis Ruffin, the oldest of eight children of George W.and Nancy (Lewis) Ruffin,who were free African Americans in Richmond, Virginia. To educate her family,NancyRuffin migrated to Boston in 1853 while her husband, a barber, remained in the South. Immediately after their marriage, Josephine and Pierre Ruffin and George Ruffin sailed for Liverpool, England, to escape discrimination and social inequality in the North. They returned after six months, and George worked as a barber until he graduated from Harvard law school in 1869.He was elected to the state legislature, the city council in 1876 and 1877, and in 1883, he became Boston's first black municipal judge.The same year, he was appointed the Boston consul for the Dominican Republic. Josephine and George Ruffin were the parents of four sons:Hubert, a lawyer; Stanley an inventor and manufacturer;George Lewis, a church organist and concert baritone; a son who died in infancy; and a daughter, Florida, a clubwoman and teacher. Josephine joined the freedom struggle prior to the Civil War.She recruited soldiers for the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Colored Regiments of Massachusetts and worked for the United States Sanitary Commission.Following the war, she organized the Boston movement of the KansasRelief Association and through it collected money and clothing to provide relief for southern blacks in the exodus to Kansas.After her husband death in 1886, Josephine  devoted her life to charities  and philanthropic work. Despite family responsibilities,she was active in numerous organizations.Josephine served on the executive  board of the Massachusetts Moral Education Association and the Massachusetts School Suffrage Association,and for eleven years  was a visitor for the Association Charities  of Boston. She continued in suffrage activities for many with Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe.While editor of the Boston Courant, a weekly newspaper, Josephine joined the New England Women's Press Association. She envisioned a women's movement directed toward the good of all, regardless of gender or race. Exclusion was not a factor in the formation of African American women's organizations. She was willing to join others in the same work and invited them to join African American women.In February 1893 Josephine organized the Woman's Era Club,in association with her daughter, Florida Ridley, and Maria Baldwin,principal of the Agassiz High School in Cambridge.The club,the first civic organization in Boston,was founded to promote the interests of both race and gender;membership was open to all women.Among the prominent women attending the first meeting were women's rights leader Lucy Stone Blackwell and Edna Dow Cheney.The Woman's Era Club adopted the motto,"Make the World Better,"the last words of the feminist Lucy Stoe, who died on Ocyober 18 1893.Josephine and Florida worked closely in club work  and,together they founded the Woman's Era, a monthly illustrated magazine available to the club members. The first issue, published in March 1894, featured a portrait and an article on Lucy Stone. It also contained an article on the closing meetings of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, of which Josephine was a member.The magazine, which was owned, managed, and published, by African American women, was a strong advocate for women entering the public arena in order to deal with their particular interests.As a result of her activities as publisher of this club magazine, she was inivited to join the Women's Press Club of Boston. By 1895 the Women's Era Club had more than 133 members.Not Only did the club dupport reform in Boston but also beyond the city. Woman's Era Club members contributed funds to support a kindergarten under the auspieces of the Educational League of Georgia.