The American Equal Rights Association (AERA) was formed in 1866 in the United States. According to its constitution, its purpose was "to secure Equal Rights to all American citizens, especially the right of suffrage, irrespective of race, color or sex." Some of the more prominent reform activists of that time were members, including women and men, blacks and whites.
The AERA was created by the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention, which transformed itself into the new organization. Leaders of the women's movement had earlier suggested the creation of a similar equal rights organization through a merger of their movement with the American Anti-Slavery Society, but that organization did not accept their proposal.
The AERA conducted two major campaigns during 1867. In New York, which was in the process of revising its state constitution, AERA workers collected petitions in support of women's suffrage and the removal of property requirements that discriminated specifically against black voters. In Kansas they campaigned for referendums that would enfranchise African Americans and women. In both places they encountered increasing resistance to the campaign for women's suffrage from former abolitionist allies who viewed it as a hindrance to the immediate goal of winning suffrage for African American men. The Kansas campaign ended in disarray and recrimination, creating divisions between those who worked primarily for the rights of African Americans and those who worked primarily for the rights of women, and also creating divisions within the women's movement itself.
The AERA continued to hold annual meetings after the failure of the Kansas campaign, but growing differences made it difficult for its members to work together. Disagreement about the proposed Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would prohibit the denial of suffrage because of race, was especially sharp because it did not also prohibit the denial of suffrage because of sex. The acrimonious AERA meeting in 1869 signaled the end of the organization and led to the formation of two competing women's suffrage organizations. The bitter disagreements that led to the demise of the AERA continued to influence the women's movement in subsequent years.
History
Leading participants
The people who played significant roles in the AERA included some of the more prominent reform activists of that time, many of them already acquainted with one another as veterans of the anti-slavery and women's rights movements:
. Lucretia Mott, the president of the AERA, was an abolitionist who was prevented from participating in the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 because she was a woman. She was the main attraction and one of the organizers of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention. Elizabeth Cady Stanton attended the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention as an observer, accompanying her husband Henry B. Stanton, who had worked as an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society. There she and Mott became friends and vowed to organize a women's rights convention in the United States. Stanton was an organizer of the Seneca Falls Convention and the primary author of its Declaration of Sentiments. Lucy Stone was a pioneering worker for women's rights and an organizer of the first National Women's Rights Convention in 1850. She became a paid representative of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1848 under an arrangement by which she could also lecture on women's rights but without pay. Susan B. Anthony became a paid representative of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1856 with the understanding that she would also continue to campaign for women's rights. Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave and abolitionist leader who played a pivotal role in the Seneca Falls women's rights convention. He and Anthony both lived in Rochester, NY, and were family friends. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper the Black American poet and anti-slavery lecturer Abby Kelley Foster and her husband Stephen Symonds Foster were abolitionists who had encouraged Anthony to become active in the Anti-Slavery Society. Henry Blackwell, who was married to Lucy Stone, worked against slavery and for women's rights. Sojourner Truth, abolitionist and women's-rights activists Sarah Parker Remond, abolitionist and activist for formerly enslaved Black people