Journalist, Civil Rights Leader, Suffragist. The daughter of John St. Pierre, a Frenchman from the island of Martinique and Elizabeth Matilda Menhenick from Cornwall, England. She was sent to New York City to a private school because her parents objected the segragated schools in Boston. After segragation in the Boston schools ended, she completed her studies at the Bowdoin School. She wed George L. Ruffin in 1858. He was the first African-American to graduated from Harvard Law School, serve on the Boston City Council, the Massachusetts state legislature, and as Boston's first black municipal judge. She and George were active in the fight against slavery, and during the Civil War, they helped recruit black soldiers into the Massachusetts 54th and 55th regiments of the Union Army. She was involved in the women's suffrage movement and worked with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1869 she formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) in Boston along with Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone. Then in 1879 she started a charity organization called the Boston Kansas Relief Association. The charity provided food and clothing to black Bostonians who where migrating to Kansas. From 1890-1897 she founded and served as editor and publisher of "Woman's Era", the countries first newspaper published by an African American woman. The paper highlighted the achievements of African-American woman and defended black women's rights. In the mid 1890s she was the first bi-racial member of the New England Woman's Club, which was founded in 1868 by Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone. In 1894 she and her daughter, Florida Ridely, founded the Women's New Era Club, which was one of the first African-American women's organizations. In 1895 she organized the National Federation of Afro-American Women. They held a conference in Boston with other national groups to demonstrate the existence of a large number of educated, cultured African-American women. The following year her organization merged with the Colored Woman's League of Washington forming the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). She was elected first vice-president. About 1903 the Woman's New Era Club dispersed but she stayed active in the fight for equal rights and in 1910 she helped form the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (NAACP) "We need to feel the cheer and inspiration of meeting each other, we need to gain the courage and fresh life that comes from the mingling of congenial souls, of those working for the same ends." Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin