What Was Frederick Douglass’s Position on Women’s Rights?

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In the aftermath of the American Civil War and at the beginnings of the Reconstruction period, communities of abolitionists readily took up the cause of universal suffrage and called for enfranchisement irrespective of race or gender. Frederick Douglass was one such prominent abolitionist and orator who lent his support to the women’s suffrage movement early on, and he remained steadfast in his conviction that women should be conferred civil rights equal to men.

Prior to the Civil War, one of the most salient events in the historical narrative of the women’s rights movement occurred in 1848: the Seneca Falls Convention. During the convention organizer Elizabeth Cady Stanton read her landmark Declaration of Sentiments, which outlined the wrongs she believed prevented women from achieving gender parity. The very first fact of her list was that men had “never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.” Frederick Douglass was one of the 32 men in attendance at the convention to sign off on the Declaration of Sentiments, and he was even further distinguished as the only African American in attendance; he had been invited by Elizabeth M’Clintock, whom he had met through their mutual involvement with the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass asserted his backing of the Seneca Falls Convention demands in a subsequent issue of his abolitionist newspaper, The North Star: “there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise, or a hand in making and administering the laws of the land. Our doctrine is, that ‘Right is of no sex.’”

Douglass’s engagement with the push for women’s rights became even more direct following the Civil War, as the issue of women’s suffrage gained traction in conjunction with calls for African American suffrage. For an abolitionist such as Douglass, eventually securing suffrage for African Americans appeared to be one of the few ways to tangibly lift emancipated persons to substantive citizenship. Simultaneously advocating for the vote for women was in accordance with his view that the strength of American democracy rested in having as wide a breadth of citizens as possible participate in the electoral process. After the public oratorical urging of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, as well as African American abolitionist and poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the two causes were formally joined with the establishment of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) in 1866. Frederick Douglass was inducted into the AERA as one of its three vice presidents at the organization’s first meeting in May 1866.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States presented the first threat to the durability of the American Equal Rights Association. Republicans’ proposals for this amendment, which would effectively grant formerly enslaved persons citizenship and civil rights, began circulating in 1865—one year before the AERA was founded. While the reality of this amendment’s contribution to an improved political status for emancipated persons remained to be seen, the explicit extension of rights to only “male citizens” proved a point of contention for some abolitionists and suffragists in the AERA, who feared the exclusionary language would cement an imbalance in constitutional rights for each gender. Others were in favour of its ratification on the basis of it being one slow step forward toward the tenability of universal suffrage. Upon the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1868, it was made publicly clear that Republicans were not inclined to promote women’s suffrage any time soon. The ratified amendment retained the language of “male inhabitants” and “male citizens”; men alone held the right to vote.

If the Fourteenth Amendment did not bode well for the union of suffragists and abolitionists, the Fifteenth Amendment proved to be the absolute turning point for the dissolution of the American Equal Rights Association. Section 1 of the introduced amendment stated, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The Association convened in New York on May 13 and 14 in 1869 to debate the group’s position on the Fifteenth Amendment, and the convention’s proceedings surfaced deeply ingrained prejudices that were impossible to reconcile among its leaders. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony refused to endorse the amendment and thereby cede suffrage to African American men before women, resorting to racist claims that those who are “educated”—essentially meaning white women—deserve enfranchisement first. Susan B. Anthony said, “If intelligence, justice, and moralities are to be placed in the government, then let the question of woman be brought first and that of the negro last.” Doing his best to avoid spewing similar bitterness, Frederick Douglass maintained that it was far more critical for African Americans to wield political power in a country that still did not value their lives in practice: “I must say that I do not see how any one can pretend that there is the same urgency in giving the ballot to women as to the negro. With us, the matter is a question of life and death.” Still Douglass was by no means divesting himself from the longer-term cause of the vote for women; he spoke for those in attendance who felt that the Fifteenth Amendment was supplying a more immediate need and would ultimately serve in the fight for universal suffrage.

At the conclusion of the two-day meeting, each side of the convention was uncompromising in their stance on the amendment. The American Equal Rights Association diverged into two different women’s rights organizations: the National Woman Suffrage Association led by Stanton and Anthony, and the American Woman Suffrage Association headed by the likes of less “radical” feminists such as Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe. Frederick Douglass aligned himself with the American Woman Suffrage Association, which favored the 1870 ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment while still lobbying for women’s suffrage. (It also allowed men to be members.)

Though hurt by the way his initial collaborators Stanton and Anthony levelled vitriolic attacks at the enfranchisement of African American men, Douglass never ceased in his public encouragement of women and their right to vote. This is evidenced by one of his many famous speeches, which came to be known as “I Am a Radical Woman Suffrage Man” (based on his remarkable declaration of the self-identification); it was delivered at the 1888 annual convention of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, incidentally in the presence of continued proponent Susan B. Anthony. In his speech he harkened back to the early reciprocity between the antislavery movement and the women’s suffrage movement, and he emphasized his belief that civil rights such as suffrage are natural rights belonging to women: “All that woman can properly ask man to do in this case, and all that man can do, is to get out of the way, to take his obstructive forces of fines and imprisonment and his obstructive usages out of the way, and let woman express her sentiments at the polls and in the government, equally with himself.”