The year after the Civil War ended, the women of this nation gathered in New York for the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention—including poet and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. She preached, ‘I say, then, that justice is not fulfilled so long as woman is unequal before the law. We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity.’ Frances—a Black woman—said those words just months after our people were freed. The faith, hope, and wisdom of Frances, and women like her, fuel my own work today.
