Teaching With Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, & Insisted on Equality for All

Lesson by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

Martha S. Jones’ Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All is a love letter to Black women’s organizing for justice. It includes profiles of more than two dozen women.

Some of these women may already be in our curriculum — Ida B. Wells and Fannie Lou Hamer, for example — but many more are likely not.

There is Jarena Lee, who transformed expectations around women’s role in the church by becoming a traveling AME preacher in the early 19th century; Hester Lane a formerly enslaved woman who started a successful home decorating business in New York City, rising to prominence in the American Anti-Slavery Society; Mary Ann Shadd, publisher of the Provincial Weekly, a newspaper that advocated against slavery and for the right of women to speak and write in public, own and control property, and work.

In this lesson, students read short excerpts from Jones’ book to learn about these and other women, share what they learned with each other, and use what they’ve gathered to analyze Jones’ provocative title — in what sense did these women constitute a “vanguard” and why?