Josephine Sophie White Griffing was born on December 18, 1814 in Hebron, Connecticut, was the daughter of Joseph White, farmer, and maker of axes, a descendant of Peregrine White, born on the Mayflower off Cape Cod.
Her mother, Sophie White, was a sister of Samuel Lovett Waldo, the artist, and a descendant of Peter Waldo, the founder of the English sect of the Waldenses.
In 1842 Josephine with her husband moved to Ohio.
Their home was a station on the Underground Railroad for slaves escaping to Canada. Hearing the pioneer lecturers on woman’s suffrage, in 1848 she became an advocate of this new cause which seemed to her another important step toward freedom for the human race. Working incessantly for this double goal, she was frequently in danger of physical violence. Parker Pillsbury wrote that she “performed labor, made sacrifices, encountered sufferings at the west, not known, probably never will be known to the world”.
Accompanied by her younger sister who gave a musical program, she coated her unpleasant doctrines with entertainment that made them more palatable to her backwoods audiences. It is in line with her character that when the Civil War came she should have been one of the earliest workers in the Loyal League and in the sanitary units, and one of the first, also, to recognize the dimensions of the problems presented by the freed slaves.
In 1863 she went to Washington to urge federal aid for these people, advocating a most modern program of education for self-support, colonization on deserted plantations, and emergency relief - with temporary work to avoid pauperization. She labored unceasingly with members of the cabinet and of Congress for the establishment of a bureau to organize and direct her projects. With her daughter she served as a paid agent of the National Freedman’s Relief Association of the District of Columbia, after it was organized in March 1863, distributing supplies, establishing industrial training centers, and convoying refugees North for employment.
She was also an assistant commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau, for the establishment of which, in 1865, she had labored zealously.
After the war, leaders of the woman’s suffrage movement declared it unthinkable that the illiterate male negro should be enfranchised and not the intelligent white woman, and in 1867 Mrs. Griffing helped organize the Universal Franchise Association of the District of Columbia and became its president. She was also corresponding secretary of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association and her sane work in Washington was most valuable in inspiring respect for her cause.
Josephine was famous as a lecturer for the Western Anti-Slavery Society and Ohio Women's Rights Association. At the end of the American Civil War she worked with the unemployed freedmen. Much of her work was done through the Freedmen's Bureau, where she worked as an assistant to the assistant commissioner and as an agent. Griffing was also active in several women's rights organizations.
Interested in the problem of negro slavery and sympathetic with the work of the anti-slavery societies, she and her husband became active in the movement, lecturing and organizing in the West.
Her work was particularly valuable because of her practical ability and imperturbable calm.
In her twenty-second year Josephine married at Hebron, Charles Stockman Spooner Griffing, a mechanic.
