Woman's Era

CTL-E-6168 · Publication · newspaper · 1890s (national distribution from 1894)

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07370 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-6168.

The Woman's Era was a Boston newspaper created by and for Black women, published under Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who served as its editor and publisher. It began as the newsletter of the Woman's Era Club, which Ruffin co-founded in Boston in 1893 with Maria Louise Baldwin, Ida B. Wells, and other Black women, a club devoted to education, anti-lynching work, and women's suffrage for Black Bostonians. In 1894 the paper began national distribution, and Massachusetts Women's History identifies it as the first national newspaper created by and for Black women. Through its pages Ruffin and her daughter Florida Ruffin Ridley publicized and organized the first National Conference of Colored Women in America, held in Boston in 1895, which drew one hundred women from twenty clubs across the country and produced the umbrella organization that later became the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. Ruffin's tenure as editor and publisher is dated 1890 to 1897 in one account, a dating that conflicts with the 1894 national launch carried here and shown openly in this record's statistics. The paper is staged as a newspaper, the form its institutional histories consistently name, rather than as a magazine or journal.

The record

• Also known as: The Woman's Era, Woman's Era (Boston)

Notes

Staged 2026-10-16 under CTL-GOV-006 (Scan Tail Wave 5 — 747 Program, Wave 12; fifth Scan Tail packet at the founder's 40-record size). Gate A (2026-10-16): Gate A CLEAR (hand-checked 2026-10-16): no Woman's Era entity or alias in the live graph (3,843 entities), and NO Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin Person entity exists (a grep for 'ruffin' returns only an unrelated name inside another record). ID CTL-E-6168 free at staging. Supply: 747 Supply Ledger, Tier 4 scan-tail reserve banked by Scan Tail Wave 4, corpus-gap-candidates ranked #2084. The scan supplied the name string only; every fact is sourced under CTL-GOV-004. SCOPE GATE: Black women's press history: the first national newspaper created by and for Black women, and an organizing instrument of the Black women's club movement — squarely within CTL's Black press and media scope. Vital status: DEFUNCT PUBLICATION — a 19th-century newspaper; Ruffin's editorship is dated to 1897 at its end in the Wikipedia account opened 2026-10-16. No current publication status is claimed. STATISTICS — Conference figures (Massachusetts Women's History, accessed 2026-10-16): the 1895 National Conference of Colored Women drew 100 women from 20 clubs. CONFLICT SHOWN, NOT BLENDED: dating differs by source — Massachusetts Women's History dates the paper's national distribution to 1894, following the club's 1893 founding, while Wikipedia's Ruffin biography dates her editorship and publishing tenure to 1890–1897. Both datings are retained; the description follows the institutional (1894 national) framing and does not merge the two into a single run date. MEDIA: photo HELD (HELD — candidate: the front page of The Woman's Era, September 1894, as illustrated on the Ruffin reference page (public-domain-era newspaper issue, 1894); NO license is claimed and the specific scan/holding was not verified at file level — PHOTO-001 verification deferred. — named candidate only; file-level rights verification per CTL-PHOTO-001 still required; no license claimed); chart FILLED (charts/chart-ctl-e-6168-woman-s-era.svg); video HELD (no matching-entity CTL Short or verified-rights archival video staged); audio HELD (no rights-cleared matching-entity audio staged); map N/A (not a place record). MEDIA LAYER (staged 2026-10-16; full per-asset PHOTO-001 records + embed specs in the packet's staged JSON, Drive packet folder): map = N/A (Publication records are not places; no sourced street address for the paper was verified from an opened source) | visual_assets = HELD: | chart = FILLED (CTL-created chart (black / deep red / gold) built only from this record's sourced statistics and timeline fact) | video = HELD (No matching-entity CTL Short in the Shorts Link Map (shorts-link-map-2026-10-15.json, 233 rows, checked by nam) | audio = HELD (HELD: No CTL-owned or rights-cleared matching-entity audio exists at staging.)

Relationships

• Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin — founded by
  Encyclopedia.com states that Ruffin and her daughter founded the Woman's Era, the Woman's Era Club's publication; the Massachusetts Women's History Center corroborates her publishing role. Closes the blocked edge documented in Scan Tail Wave 5.
• Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin — wrote for
  Ruffin edited the Woman's Era; the editorship is dated 1890–1897 by BlackPast and until 1900 by Encyclopedia.com — the conflict is recorded on CTL-E-6286 and this edge carries no date. Grounded in the Woman's Era record's own text (published under Ruffin, its editor and publisher).

Sources

• Massachusetts Women's History (Women's History Month / MA Women's History Project), Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (accessed 2026-10-16) — Ruffin co-founded the Woman's Era Club in 1893; in 1894 the club newsletter The Woman's Era began national distribution as the first national newspaper created by and for Black women; the 1895 National Conference of Colored Women in Boston drew 100 women from twenty clubs — https://www.mawomenshistory.org/josephine-st-pierre-ruffin (primary source · build store)
• Wikipedia, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (accessed 2026-10-16) — Ruffin was editor of the Woman's Era, the first national newspaper published by and for African-American women; she served as editor and publisher from 1890 to 1897; the paper called on Black women to demand increased rights — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_St._Pierre_Ruffin (build store)

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Record CTL-E-6168 · Combined Graph record U-07370 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 2 sources · 2 mapped relationships.
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Researched and maintained by the CultureTechLens research program · CultureTechLens Combined Graph, Release 2026-11-04. Corrections are public: the corrections log.

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