“I am a radical woman suffrage man,” Frederick Douglass declared at the annual meeting of the New England Woman Suffrage Association on May 28, 1888, before adding, “I was such a man nearly fifty years ago.” In this speech, as in many others, Douglass conflated the beginning of his women’s rights activism with his escape from slavery in 1838 and his subsequent fight for abolition. Douglass had also spoken alongside other veterans of the women’s rights movement at the International Council of Women’s “Conference of the Pioneers,” held earlier that year in Washington, DC, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls convention, the first women’s rights convention to take place in the United States.1 There, he reaffirmed his position as an ally in the fight for women’s rights. “When I ran away from slavery,” he told the audience, “it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of woman, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act” (SDI 5:383, 353).
Douglass’s women’s rights activism was shaped by his multiple identities and experiences as an enslaved, then free Black man, an abolitionist, an activist and politician, a husband, a father, and a friend. It was also influenced by the various networks through which he navigated. Douglass was both a key figure of antebellum (mostly white) women’s rights meetings and an active participant at the Black conventions held regularly throughout the nineteenth century where, alongside abolition and the advocacy of Black rights, the situation of women was often raised in debate.2 Despite his self-description as a “woman’s-rights-man,” however, the consistency of Douglass’s feminist positions was weakened by the complexities inherent in maintaining a stable reform coalition centered on universal rights before and after the Civil War – when women’s rights were often pitted against racial equality – and the limitations of the early feminist movement, including its all too frequent exclusion of Black women from debates (LT 370).3
“I belong to the women,” Douglass famously claimed in an 1868 speech, in which he argued that Blacks’ and women’s rights were not “inconsistent.” To support this claim, which was met with laughter, he described the help he had received from British women to buy his freedom from his enslaver Hugh Auld in 1846, and the work of female members of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS) who, he recalled, had “surrounded and protected” him as he became an active abolitionist during the early 1840s (SDI 4:181). In his 1892 autobiography Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Douglass explained that his advocacy of women’s rights was a response to “woman’s agency, devotion, and efficiency in pleading the cause of the slave” and a form of “gratitude for this high service” (LT 370).
It was after a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1841 that Douglass first met Elizabeth Cady Stanton who, he later claimed, converted him to the cause of women’s rights. In Life and Times he recalled the effect of their discussions:
I could not meet her arguments [against women’s exclusion from the public sphere] except with the shallow plea of “custom,” “natural division of duties,” “indelicacy of woman’s taking part in politics,” the common talk of “woman’s sphere,” and the like, all of which that able woman, who was then no less logical than now, brushed away by those arguments which she has so often and effectively used since, and which no man has yet successfully refuted.
Despite this description, Stanton probably found in Douglass an ally already convinced of women’s equality. The antislavery organizations he joined in 1841 were very different from what they had been only a few years earlier. The American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) had split in 1840, following months of debates on the “woman question.” William Lloyd Garrison and his followers believed that women should be admitted in the same associations as men, and that abolitionists should refuse to participate in a democratic process based on what they described as a proslavery US Constitution. Following the election of Abby Kelley to the AASS business committee in May of that year, several male members had left the organization and its state auxiliaries, all of which could admit female members. Douglass thus worked in close collaboration with women when he became involved with the Garrisonian MASS. In late 1841, he campaigned in Rhode Island alongside Kelley, a renowned antislavery lecturer at that time, against the draft of a new constitution excluding Black men from the vote.5
Douglass’s speeches and writings reveal how his years in bondage informed his position as a women’s rights activist in various, and at times contradictory, ways. His 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave shows his awareness of the specific abuse enslaved women underwent, as in the dramatic rendering of his aunt Hester being beaten, and the story of Caroline, used by her enslaver Edward Covey for forced reproduction. In 1858, he argued that his experience as an enslaved man meant “it was impossible that he could be indifferent to any call for freedom” and that, for him, the rights of the enslaved were based on the same principles as “the rights of woman to freedom and to equality” (SDI 3:213). However, Douglass’s Narrative and subsequent autobiographies provide evidence of a problematic relationship with “the feminine,” such as a desire to erase women from his genealogy and somewhat voyeuristic descriptions of the violence inflicted upon enslaved women. Rooted in a defense of traditional gender roles, his vision of slavery as a destroyer of enslaved families may have informed his approach to women’s rights before and after the Civil War.6
The early women’s rights movement was, to a large extent, born out of the late 1830s debates about the place of women within abolitionism and the questioning of structural inequalities prompted by the fight against slavery.7 This was also a time when Douglass’s life changed dramatically, as he experienced global fame from the publication of the Narrative and his 1845–47 tour of the British Isles, from which he returned a free man. Having moved to Rochester, New York, Douglass achieved his longed-for independence from the Garrisonians by launching the North Star in December 1847. He pledged to open the pages of his newspaper, whose very existence was made possible by the funds raised by women during his sojourn in Great Britain, “to the candid and decorous discussion of all measures and topics of a moral and humane character, which may serve to enlighten, improve, and elevate mankind.”8 The motto of the newspaper, “Right is of no sex – Truth is of no color – God is the father of us all, and we are all brethren,” is evidence of his efforts to include women’s rights in a broader reform platform.
Douglass’s interest in women’s rights and reform in general prompted his presence at Seneca Falls. Not only was a notice announcing the convention published in the North Star, but Douglass also received a personal letter of invitation from the organizers.9 At the meeting, on July 19 and 20, 1848, Douglass and Stanton famously defended a resolution on women’s suffrage against the opposition of many participants, who either deemed the demand too controversial or did not see it as crucial to the fight for women’s rights. Douglass was beginning to distance himself from the Garrisonians’ refusal to take part in the democratic process. On the margins of the abolition movement and married to the abolitionist Henry B. Stanton, who had rejected Garrison’s stance on political action and left the AASS, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was also a vocal supporter of women’s suffrage.10 At the fortieth anniversary conference, she presented a detailed, though possibly inaccurate, account of the convention, recalling the opposition of other organizers to her resolution on women’s suffrage and her determination to put it forward. She had no experience of public speaking and asked Douglass for help, “whisper[ing] in his ear what [she] wanted said,” but then eventually interrupting him when “he didn’t speak quite fast enough for [her].”11 According to Stanton, then, it was she who chose Douglass to help her, knowing he would understand the value of the franchise for women and was a celebrated orator with great powers of persuasion.
Those who attended the Seneca Falls convention had expected “misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule.”12 In a North Star editorial a few days after the event, Douglass praised the “extraordinary meeting” and noted that the proceedings “were almost wholly conducted by women,” “a novel position” for them. He reaffirmed his support for women’s rights, based on his “approbation of any movement, however humble, to improve and elevate the character and condition of any members of the human family.” Believing women would be the primary force behind this new movement, Douglass concluded his editorial by bidding “the women engaged in this movement our humble God-speed.”13 Despite the participants’ abolitionist convictions and the presence of Douglass, however, the Seneca Falls proceedings did not include discussions about slavery or the situation of Black women, who most probably did not attend the convention.14 The Declaration of Sentiments, drafted and presented by Stanton and signed by one hundred people, including Douglass, clearly reflected the interests of its mostly white and middle-class signatories.15
At that time Douglass was also active in Black conventions and Black reform associations, where the woman question regularly caused disagreement. In September 1848, Douglass and North Star coeditor Martin Delany advocated a resolution calling for women’s equal participation in debates at the National Convention of Colored Freemen in Cleveland, Ohio; the resolution was defeated in committee but adopted by the general assembly. A month later, women were appointed officers at a meeting of the Philadelphia African American antislavery society, probably with the help of male allies such as Douglass, Delany, Charles Lenox Remond, and Robert Purvis. Although Douglass was the only African American man present at Seneca Falls, other Black men attended subsequent women’s rights conventions. In August 1848, Douglass was joined at the Rochester Woman’s Rights Convention by fellow Black male activists Jermain Loguen and William Cooper Nell.16
After Seneca Falls, Douglass became a fixture at women’s rights conventions, where he argued in favor of a comprehensive, though at times inconsistent, feminist agenda. In Rochester, he again appealed for women’s suffrage, arguing that a man “should not dare claim a right that he would not concede to woman.” Along with Nell, he “advocated the emancipation of women from all the artificial disabilities, imposed by false customs, creeds, and codes.”17 At the First National Woman’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, in October 1850, he delivered a potent lesson drawn from his own experience, rooted in what he described as the “continual exercise of his rights”: “Let Woman take her rights,” he intoned, “and then she shall be free.” Even before the Civil War, however, Douglass’s defense of women’s rights was influenced by both his personal life and his attention to the articulation of fights against racial and gender inequalities, anticipating to a certain extent the debates that would take place after the war. In 1853, he unexpectedly opposed joint ownership of marital property:
Woman has a right to the elective franchise; has a right to the same intellectual culture as man; her sphere should be bounded only by her power. But one point troubles me: that is the disposition of property. It seems to me not altogether fair to give the wife an equal right to the disposition of the property. The husband labors hard, perhaps, while the wife lives in luxury.
Those remarks are clearly inconsistent with his first wife Anna Murray’s central position in their marriage and her economic as well as domestic contribution to the well-being of the household. They show Douglass’s reluctance to go against traditional gender norms that made man the head of the family.18
Likewise, in 1854, Douglass attacked women’s rights activist Lucy Stone for speaking in Philadelphia in front of white-only audiences, criticizing her for what he saw as “an abandonment of the cause of the colored people.”19 The following year, in a speech to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society he went a step further, describing the 1840 schism of the AASS as “a sad mistake,” made over the “very minor question” of women’s participation in the same associations as men. Without actually naming her, he accused Abby Kelley of having behaved selfishly at the time, to the detriment of the abolitionist cause:
Before I would have stood in such an attitude, and taken the responsibility of dividing the ranks of freedom’s army, I would have suffered my right arm to be taken off. How beautiful would it have been for that woman, how nobly would her name have come down to us in this history, had she said: … While I see no objection to my occupying a place on your committee, I can for the slave’s sake forego that privilege.
He then advocated two independent movements, one for “Woman’s Rights,” the other for “the slave’s cause.”20 Evidently, Douglass’s belief in a united reform movement based on universal rights was faltering, at a time when activists felt the end of slavery was nowhere in sight.21
Due to his unique position as a key figure in women’s rights, abolitionism, and Black conventions, Douglass’s approach to gender and race took on another dimension after the war, influenced by party politics and debates over the rights of freedmen and -women following abolition. Like many other activists, including women, Douglass had not campaigned for women’s rights during the war. In May 1866, he became a vice president of the newly founded American Equal Rights Association (AERA), intended to promote universal suffrage. The organization was swiftly torn apart by debates on the impossibility of achieving universal suffrage in the immediate future and the precedence of Black men’s enfranchisement over Black and white women’s. At the AASS annual meeting in January 1865, Douglass argued – as he had a decade earlier – that the two issues must be dealt with separately: “I hold that women as well as men have the right to vote (applause), and my heart and my voice go with the movement to extend suffrage to woman. But that question rests upon another basis than that on which our right rests.” By May 1868, in a context that pitted women’s suffrage against that of Black men, he contended that “the ballot means something more than a mere abstract idea” for the latter, and that white women were already represented by their “brothers,” “husbands,” and “fathers,” while “the black wife has no husband who can vote for her.” A few months later, in an address delivered in Providence, Rhode Island, he called for women and Blacks to “go along together” but suggested that white women had an advantage over Black men: “You are beautiful and we are not. Your faces have a charm to the governing power. Ours have not” (SDI 4:62–63, 175, 185). Douglass’s comments and the interventions of white female activists in the debate illustrate how the Reconstruction discussions on universal suffrage were largely structured around an opposition between white women and Black men at the expense of Black women.22
The annual meeting of the AERA in May 1869 split the movement in two. Douglass reiterated that due to the violence they faced, Black men had “an urgency to obtain the ballot” that white women did not. When asked by an audience member if that was not the case of Black women, he famously answered: “Yes, yes, yes; it is true of the black woman, but not because she is a woman, but because she is black.”23 These debates show that Douglass had come to consider the fate of Black women as interconnected to that of Black men, and that circumstances dictated Black male suffrage be given precedence. In 1869, when two women’s suffrage associations were created – the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) led by Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) led by Stone and others – Douglass did not join either, possibly in response to the racist undertones of many white suffragists who advocated for (white) women’s suffrage while undermining Black men’s claims for citizenship.
Yet the rift between Douglass and his former white female allies was rapidly repaired. Soon after the Fifteenth Amendment prohibiting denial of suffrage based on race was ratified in 1870, Douglass called for Black women “to prepare themselves” for a Sixteenth Amendment enfranchising women.24 Addressing the New England branch of the AWSA in 1873, he counted himself among the “colored men in the country who have not forgotten the rights of others in having received their own rights” (SDI 4:396). He sat on the organizing committee of the Seneca Falls thirtieth anniversary meeting.25 Douglass regularly attended women’s rights conventions up until his death, presenting speeches that were mostly retrospective analyses of his role in the antebellum feminist movement. Despite a long commitment to gender equality, Douglass often mentioned his reluctance to speak for women, insisting that he could contribute “nothing to the force and very little to the volume of argument in favor of the claims [women] make,” and called for men to take a back seat in what was now a movement for and by women. At the Conference of the Pioneers, Douglass claimed that “this is an International Council, not of men, but of women, and women should have all the say in it.” In keeping with many speeches he gave in the 1880s on the topic of women’s rights and men’s place in the fight, Douglass argued that men had “very little business here as speakers anyhow, and if they come here at all, they should take back benches and wrap themselves in silence.” At that time he was merely stating the obvious as the call for the International Council of Women had only been signed by women, and its constitution was tellingly introduced with “We, women of the United States.”26 When Douglass took the floor it was “with unusual diffidence”: for him, the women’s rights movement had made such progress that it could “dispense” with men altogether (SDI 5:248, 349, 350).
Douglass continued to advocate for gender equality in the name of universal rights. “Woman is woman. She is herself, and nobody else than herself. Her selfhood is as complete, perfect and absolute as is the selfhood of man,” he reiterated in speech after speech.27 In an undated essay, he addressed the objection that women’s enfranchisement would “introduce strife and division in the family.” His response reveals reluctance to consider men and women as members of different groups; rather, he chose to focus on women’s integrity as individuals. “Who on earth,” he asked, “can want to spend his or her days as a simple echo? – a body without concessions or light under a bushel, a talent buried in silence, a piece of intellectual emptiness and social nothingness?”28
Douglass died on February 20, 1895, after attending a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington. In a collection of tributes edited by his second wife Helen Pitts Douglass, Stanton lauded Douglass’s long commitment to the cause of women’s rights as well as his special status as women’s unwavering ally, writing that “he was the only man I ever knew who understood the degradation of disfranchisement for women.”29 In keeping with this narrative, Douglass’s role in defense of the cause of women’s rights has achieved “near-legendary status.”30 Although rooted in strong convictions, Douglass’s defense of women’s rights was also informed by his unique position as a Black man belonging to diverse networks which did not systematically overlap in nineteenth-century American politics and society – interracial abolitionist societies, the Black convention network, and women’s rights conventions dominated by white women. While he often managed to bridge race and gender divides, he was also acutely sensitive to the complexities and, in some circumstances, the impossibilities of the claim for universal rights, which challenged his steadfast support for women’s rights.
