Working with her husband, Ruffin became active in the
abolitionist movement. During the
American Civil War, they helped recruit
black soldiers for the
Union Army, specifically the
54th and
55th Massachusetts regiments. They also worked for the Sanitation Commission, which provided aid for the care of soldiers in the field. Ruffin supported
women's suffrage and, in 1869, joined with
Julia Ward Howe and
Lucy Stone to form the
American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) in Boston. A group of these women, Howe and Stone also founded the
New England Women's Club in 1868. Josephine Ruffin became its first black member when she joined in the mid-1890s. Ruffin founded the first black woman's newspaper, ''
The Woman's Era. She also wrote for the black weekly paper, The Courant'', and became a member of the
New England Woman's Press Association. In 1910, Ruffin helped form the Boston chapter of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She also wrote a special suffrage edition of
The Crisis in 1915.
Club work In 1891, Ruffin served as the first president of Boston's
Co-Worker's Club. In 1894, Ruffin organized the
Woman's Era Club, an advocacy group for black women, with the help of her daughter
Florida Ridley and
Maria Baldwin, a Boston school principal. In 1895, Ruffin organized the
National Federation of Afro-American Women with
Julia O. Henson. She convened the
First National Conference of the Colored Women of America in Boston, which was attended by women from 42 black women's clubs from 14 states. The following year, the organization merged with the
Colored Women's League to form the
National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC).
Mary Church Terrell was elected president and Ruffin served as one of the organization's vice-presidents. and were widely covered in newspapers around the country, most of whom supported Ruffin. Afterwards, the Woman's Era Club made an official statement "that colored women should confine themselves to their clubs and the large field of work open to them there." The New Era Club was disbanded in 1903, but Ruffin remained active in the struggle for equal rights. Along with other women who had belonged to the New Era Club, she co-founded the League of Women for Community Service, which still exists today. ==Personal life==