This dissertation argues that a national network of new Negro women emerged during the 1890s to assume a significant role in the struggles for social justice in the United States; their efforts deserve attention in new women studies as well as in the more general history of the period. Using prosopography, along with analysis of rhetoric, life writing and autobiographical studies, this study challenges previous conceptualizations of new womanhood as Euro-American and uncovers a multi-generational alliance composed of activists born in the 1860s and 1870s and a smaller cohort who grew up before the Civil War. A profile of the network and a comparative examination of the membership illuminate the critical part played by Ida B. Wells-Barnett as both representative of new Negro women and the catalyst in making them visible. The October 1892 testimonial staged for her benefit reveals a network that evolved along the northeastern corridor, linked New York-Brooklyn and Boston and eventually, assumed national dimensions. This study underscores the impact of Wells' revelations about lynching and the subsequent attacks on her character in galvanizing a core group of activists that include Victoria Earle Matthews. Maritcha Lyons. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Florida Ruffin Ridley and Maria Baldwin. In their essays, life writing and articles, the core group engaged in the process of self-definition and articulated a keen sense of identity as advanced, as progressive and as new women, thus meriting a place in the history of feminism. At the same time, new Negro women were vital to sustaining the anti-lynching crusade and therefore, a Civil Rights agenda; moreover, they promoted the importance, preservation and transmission of African American history that anticipated and laid the groundwork for the Black Studies Movement. This dissertation maintains that they stand at the nexus of both the women's and the long Civil Rights movements. In a variety of contexts during the Jim Crow-Progressive Era, new Negro women consistently maintained dual commitments to female empowerment and anti-racist politics. Furthermore, it demonstrates how, as beneficiaries of a long and rich heritage of association building, they took responsibility for reshaping that tradition.