I Am a Radical Woman Suffrage Man: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 28, 1888
I AM A RADICAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE MAN: AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED IN BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, ON 28 MAY 1888
Boston Woman's Journal, 2 June 1888. Other texts in Speech File, reel 19, frames 756–63,
FD Papers, DLC; Foner, Douglass on Women’s Rights, 116–24.
Continuing his campaign for women’s rights, Douglass attended the annual
convention of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, which met in
Boston on 28–31 May 1888. Although Douglass made a few brief remarks
during the business sessions of the convention, he delivered his major address
at the public session at Tremont Temple on the evening of 28 May. Lucy
Stone, president of the association, presided over that gathering and intro-
duced Douglass. The Reverend Henry Blanchard of Maine, Laura Ormiston
Chant of England, William Dudley Foulke of Indiana, and Thomas Went-
worth Higginson spoke after Douglass. The audience expressed appreciation
for Douglass’s speech with “prolonged applause,” the Boston Woman's Jour-
nal reported. The association later paid Douglass $50 to defray his expenses
while attending their convention. Lucy Stone to Douglass, 31 May 1888,
General Correspondence File, reel 4, frame 808, FD Papers, DLC; Boston
Globe 27, 29, 30, 31 May 1888; Washington Bee, 9 June 1888; Boston
Woman’s Journal, 9 June 1888.
Madam President, Ladies and Gentlemen: While I esteem it an honor to
stand on this New England woman suffrage platform, I do not feel that I
have a right to the prominence you have been pleased to give me in your
proceedings by calling upon me at this time. It is, perhaps, about time that I
should decline to be a speaker on occasions like the present. Having
survived the anti-slavery conflict, and lived to rejoice in the victory over
slavery, and being no longer as young as I once was, I am a little too late for
efficiency and prominence in the great cause you have in hand. My special
mission in the world, if I ever had any, was the emancipation and enfran-
chisement of the negro. Your mission is the emancipation and enfranchise-
ment of woman. Mine was a great cause. Yours is a much greater cause,
since it comprehends the liberation and elevation of one-half of the whole
human family. Happily, however, I have two good reasons for coming upon
this platform to-night. The first is, I live near the city of Washington; not a
very strong reason, perhaps, but I come to you from an atmosphere largely
pervaded with the woman suffrage sentiment, and am so much in sympathy
with it, that it is more difficult to be silent than to speak in its favor. In the
second place, this cause has a valid claim upon my “service and labor,”
outside of its merits. The New England Woman Suffrage Association is
composed in part of the noble women who dared to speak for the freedom
of the slave, at a time when it required far more courage to do so than is
required to speak in the woman suffrage cause at this day.
I have said I reside near Washington, the capital of the nation. Let me
say a word about that city in connection with this and kindred reforms. Its
behavior of late has been worthy of praise. In the old times, prior to the war
and the abolition of slavery, there was no room in it for woman suffrage or
negro suffrage or for many other good things. It shuddered at the thought of
a new idea—slavery, the slave-trade, slave auctions, horse-racing, duels,
and revivals of religion were the popular excitements in the Washington of
that day. But now old Washington has passed away, and a new Washington
has come into existence. Under our much-abused Gov. Sheppard,1Alexander R. Shepherd. its
physical features have been visibly improved, and under the influence of
Northern ideas, its moral features have equally improved. The time is not
distant, I hope, when it will symbolize all that is good, great, glorious and
free, and much of the glory of that result will be due to the efforts of
women.
It will next year be the theatre of a grand international exposition. Its
attractive power is destined to increase with every year, and Boston itself as
a reformatory centre may begin to look to its laurels.
Boston was once known as the hot-bed of abolitionism. Washington, if
it keeps well on its way, will soon become the hot-bed of woman suffrage.
One of the most imposing demonstrations in favor of the rights and dignity
of woman was held there only a few weeks ago. You may have heard
something of this before. Women from the East, women from the West,
women from the North, and women from the South; women from home
and women from abroad, met there in International Council,2The Intemational Council of Women met at Albaugh's Grand Opera House in Washington, D.C. between 25 March and 1 April 1888. and united in
a solemn demand for a larger measure of liberty, and a fuller participation
in the government of the world, than has ever yet been accorded to woman.
No assemblage, to my knowledge, can be pointed to in the history of this
republic, which ever presented a more sublime spectacle than did this
International Council. Its presence was an argument in favor of its cause.
Its refinement, earnestness, ability and dignity repelled criticism and over-
came opposition. In the hope and enthusiasms it inspired, some of us were
made to think, or rather to feel, that the year of woman’s jubilee had
already dawned.
But this Council has adjourned, and although its beneficent influence
will continue to be felt far and wide over the world, we are still confronted
with the same old conflict, and must fight it out on the line of agitation
though it shall take a century. There is still a delinquent, tardy, and reluctant
Massachusetts to be converted,3As late as 1915, a popular referendum in the state of Massachusetts to extend the right to vote to women received only a 35.5% yes vote. Women could not vote in that state until after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 276–71, 292–93. there is still a mass of bigotry and superstition
to overcome. There is still a Methodist Episcopal Conference con-
fronting us and barring the way to woman’s progress, as it once barred the
way to emancipation.4The position of women in the Methodist Episcopal Church had never been formally defined prior to the General Conference of 1880. At that meeting, the all-male delegates ruled that women could not become ordained ministers or local preachers but could serve in such subordinate offices as Sunday school superintendent. The question of admitting women as lay delegates to the general conference arose at the meeting of 1888 when four female delegates appeared as representatives of midwestern annual conferences. The general conference refused to seat these women and referred the issue to a referendum of church members. The results of this referendum, held in 1890 and 1891, failed to provide the necessary three-fourths majority required to amend the church constitution. The issue was finally resolved in 1906 when the church acknowledged the complete equality of women in all lay roles. Journal of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Held in New York, May 1-31, 1888 (New York, 1888), 51, 83, 97–98, 103–06, 463; AAC, 1888, 540; Rosemary Skinner Keller, “Creating a Sphere for Women: The Methodist Episcopal Church, 1869-1906," in Women in New Worlds: Historical Perspectives on the Wesleyan Tradition, ed. Hilah F. Thomas and Rosemary Skinner Keller (Nashville, 1981), 246–60. There is still a great nation to be brought to a
knowledge of the truth. We are not to be appalled by the magnitude of the
work. or discouraged by this or any form of opposition.
We old abolitionists never allowed ourselves to be dismayed by re-
pulses, however grievous. Those engaged in this cause are of the self-same
material. In some respects this woman suffrage movement is but a continu-
ance of the old anti-slavery movement. We have the same sources of
opposition to contend with, and we must meet them with the same spirit
and determination, and with much the same arguments which we em-
ployed against what Charles Sumner called the “seven-headed barbarism
of slavery.”5The precise phrase the “seven-headed barbarism of slavery" has not been located in Charles Sumner's speeches or letters. Douglass probably alludes to the arguments of Sumner's “The Barbarism of Slavery" address delivered in the U.S. Senate on 4 June 1860 soon after the Massachusetts senator's return to the body following his slow recuperation from the attack by Preston Brooks in 1856. In this carefully reasoned speech, Sumner analyzed the barbarism of slavery under various “heads” and at one point denounced slavery as: “Barbarous in origin, barbarous in law, barbarous in all its pretensions, barbarous in the instruments it employs, barbarous in consequences, barbarous in spirit, barbarous wherever it shows itself. Slavery must breed Barbarians, while it develops everywhere, alike in the individual and the society to which he belongs, the essential elements of Barbarism." Charles Sumner: His Complete Works, 6: 119–237.
In reform, as in war. it is always a point gained to know just where the
enemy is, and just what he is about. It is not easy to deal with an enemy in
the dark. It was a great thing for the abolition cause, fifty years ago, when
the Methodist Episcopal Conference at Cincinnati declared itself opposed
to abolitionism, and that it had no right, wish, or intention to abolish
slavery.6Douglass alludes to the position taken by the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Conference at their meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, on 13 May 1836. John R. McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), 46. It is now equally something to know that this same great organization
takes its stand against the movement for the equal rights of woman in
its ecclesiastical assemblies. That older conference was not able, by its
opposition to abolitionism, to save slavery, nor will this later conference be
able to continue the degradation of woman, by denying her a voice and a
vote in its councils. The Methodist Church is rich in resources, but it cannot
well afford to enforce this Mahometan idea of woman upon American
women—an idea in which woman has no recognized moral, social, or
religious existence. In the mosques of the East, her presence among the
faithful is held a defilement.7No prohibition against the admission of women to Islamic mosques exists in the Koran. Over the centuries, some Islamic religious leaders argued for this exclusion and in many regions women were confined to certain sections of the mosque. The Encyclopaedia of Islam: A Dictionary of Geography, Ethnography and Biography of the Muhammadan Peoples, 4 vols. (Leiden, The Netherlands, 1913–36), 3: 326. She is deemed incapable of self-direction—a
body without a soul. No more distressing thing confronted us during our
recent tour in Egypt8The Douglasses toured Egypt from 15 February to 16 March 1887. FD Diary, reel 1, frames 27–35, FD Papers, DLC. than this social and religious annihilation of woman.
Religion there strikes woman dead. Her face is not to be seen; her voice is
not to be heard; her moral influence is not to be exerted. She is cushioned,
cabined, confined and guarded, and treated more like a criminal than like
an innocent person. She sees the world only through a veil, or from behind
a lattice-work. She is constantly under the surveillance of a sentinel, wear-
ing the human form, but destitute of all manly sympathy. This Methodist
attempt to exclude woman from the conference of the church, has in it a
strong element of this Mahometan idea of the proper sphere and treatment
of woman.
Whatever may be said of the pious Mahometan, men and women here
will ask, and demand to know, what harm could possibly come to the
Methodist Church and its ministers, from the presence of a few or many
Christian women in its conference? The sexes meet together in prayer-
meeting, in class-meeting, in “love feast,” and in the great congregations
of the church. Why should these gospel preachers, who mingle everywhere
else in the church with women, be afraid to meet women in their con-
ferences? What work have they to do there which women should not know?
I will press this question no further, but I call upon the Methodist Church to
assist us in separating woman’s condition in America as far apart from her
condition in Egypt as the east is from the west. We have heard a great deal
of late as to what Christianity has done for woman. We have a right to call
upon these Christian ministers to show that what has been done, has not
been done in spite of the church, but in accordance with its teachings. One
thing is certain, when the chains of woman shall be broken, when she shall
become the recognized equal of man, and is put into the full enjoyment of
all the rights of an American citizen, as she will be, the church and ministry
will be among the first to claim the honor of the victory, and to say, “We did
it!”
It is hardly necessary for me to say, after what I have already said, that I
am a radical woman suffrage man. I was such a man nearly fifty years ago.
I had hardly brushed the dust of slavery from my feet and stepped upon the
free soil of Massachusetts, when I took the suffrage side of this question.
Time, thought and experience have only increased the strength of my
conviction. I believe equally in its justice, in its wisdom, and in its ne-
cessity.
But, as I understand the matter, woman does not ask man for the right
of suffrage. That is something which man has no power to give. Rights do
not have their source in the will or the grace of man. They are not such
things as he can grant or withhold according to his sovereign will and
pleasure. 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. Give her fair play and let her alone.
But we are told that suffrage is not a right, that it is neither a right for
man nor for woman, but that it is simply a privilege. I do not know when or
by whom this startling discovery was made, but it is evidently deemed very
important and highly satisfactory by the opponents of woman suffrage.
Well, for argument’s sake, let it be conceded that suffrage is not a
natural right, but that it is simply a privilege, something that is created and
exists only by conventional arrangement; something that can be granted or
withheld at the option of those who make it a privilege. I say let all this be
conceded, which I do not concede. Several important questions must be
answered by those who support this pretension, before the friends of
woman suffrage can be silenced or be made to accept it as final.
In the first place we have a right to know by what authority, human or
divine, suffrage was made a privilege and not a right; we have a right to
know when, where, how, and in the light of what doctrine of human liberty,
suffrage was made a privilege and not a right. We have a right to know if
such an arrangement could be properly created without the cooperation of
woman herself. We have a right to know if men, acting alone, have a right
to decide what is right and what is privilege where their action in the case is
to determine the position of woman. We have a right to know, if suffrage is
simply a privilege, by what right the exercising of that privilege is con-
ferred only upon men. If it is a privilege, we have the right to know why
woman is excluded. If it is a privilege. we have the right to know why
woman is not as fully, fairly entitled to exercise that privilege as man
himself.
After all, we see that nothing has been gained by the opponents of
women suffrage. by sheltering themselves behind this assumption that
suffrage is a privilege and not a right. The argument is an old one, and has
been answered a thousand times, and will. perhaps, have to be answered a
thousand times more. before woman suffrage shall be the law of the land.
I suppose we must do here, as was done in the case of the anti-slavery
agitation, give line upon line and precept upon precept, as we had to do
forty years ago.
Woman’s claim to the right of equal participation in government with
man, has its foundation in the nature and personality of woman and in the
admitted doctrine of American liberty and in the authority and structure of
our Republican government. When the rich man wanted some one sent
from the dead to warn his brothers against coming where he was, he was
told that if they heard not Moses and the prophets, neither would they be
persuaded though one rose from the dead.9Douglass summarizes the biblical parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus. Luke 16: 19-31. Now our Moses and our proph-
ets, so far as the rights and privileges of American citizens are concerned,
are the framers of the Declaration of American Independence. If the Amer-
ican people will not hear these. they will not be persuaded though one rose
from the dead.
According to the Declaration of Independence and to the men who
signed that great charter of human liberty, all rightful powers of govern-
ment are derived from the consent of the governed.
No man has yet been able to state when, where and how woman has
ever given her consent to be deprived of all participation in the government
under which she lives, or why women should be excepted from the prin-
ciples of the American Declaration of Independence. We are told that man
derived his authority thus to disenfranchise woman from Nature; well, we
should all have great respect for Nature. We cannot too often listen to her
voice and learn the lessons she teaches. She is the great storehouse of
knowledge, wisdom and truth. It was here that Hooker learned that beau-
tiful sentiment that law has her seat in the bosom of God and her voice is the
harmony of the universe.10Douglass, substituting “universe” for "world," makes only minor errors in quoting from Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594–97) by English theologian Richard Hooker (1554–1600). The Works of That Learned and Judirious Divine Mr. Richard Hooker, Containing Eight Books of Ecclesiastieal Polity, 2 vols. (Oxford. Eng., 1807), 1: 291. I think the friends of woman suffrage have no
reason to refuse to have the question of their rights tried in this august court
we call Nature.
Let us begin then with Nature in the family. This is the starting-point of
life, the natural starting-point of organized society and of the State. Here
are a son and a daughter in the same household. They have nursed at the
same breast in their infancy; they have been supplied from the same board;
they have talked, sung, prayed, and played together on equal terms in their
youth; they have grown to manhood and womanhood together; in a word,
they have been equal members of the same family together all their young
lives, with substantially the same rights and privileges in the common
family; they have received the same moral and intellectual training, and
have enjoyed the same freedom of thought and expression around the
family board—the right to ask and to answer questions. They are equal in
moral and intellectual endowments, or if not so equal, the one is as likely to
be superior as the other, the daughter as the son, the sister as the brother.
Now the question to be answered at this point is just this: At what time and
under what conditions does nature step in to change the relations of these
two people and make the son and brother the ruler of this daughter and
sister? When does Nature say that he shall elect law-makers, and make
laws, institute governments, define for her the metes and bounds of her
liberty, and that she, a rational creature like himself, shall have no voice or
vote in determining any question concerning the government under which
she, equally with him, is to live? They were equal in the cradle, equal in the
family, equal in childhood, equal in youth, equal at maturity, equal in the
right to life, to liberty, and in the pursuit of happiness. I demand to know,
then, what fiat of nature, what moral earthquake from below, or what
thunder-bolt from above, has driven these two people asunder—raised one
to the sky and struck the other to earth—one to freedom and the other to
slavery. The only answer that Nature is alleged to give here in opposition to
woman, is one which no just and generous man can or should accept, for it
bases a moral and intellectual conclusion—one which excludes woman
from all freedom of choice in the affairs of government—upon a purely
physical fact. The logic is that man is physically stronger than woman, and
that he has the right to make her a subject of his will; that since she cannot
shoulder a musket and fight, she shall not select a ballot and vote—that
though she may have the ability to think, she shall not have the right to
express her thought and give effect to her thought by her vote. There is no
getting away from the conclusion here other than that the essence of this
anti-woman suffrage doctrine is that might makes right. It is the right of the
usurper, the slave-holder, the tyrant, the robber and pirate—a right which
better befits wild beasts than reasoning men and women—a right which no
woman ought to admit and no man should claim. The only thing that saves
it from execration is the fact that men are too humane and too civilized to
make their practice conform to the full measure of their theory. They deny
rights, but admit influence. She may not vote herself, they say, but she may
influence the man who does vote, and it is precisely this which constitutes
the vice of this relation, for it gives influence and excludes responsibility. A
sense of responsibility is an essential element in all our exertions and
relations. We need it; woman needs it, not less than man, to work out the
best results of her conduct. Divest woman of power and you divest her of a
sense of responsibility and duty—two of the essential attributes of all
useful exertion and existence.
In tracing the moral and intellectual progress of mankind from barba-
rism to civilization, we see that any and every advance, however simple
and reasonable, has been sternly resisted. It appears that the more simple
the proposition of reform, the more stern and passionate has been the
resistance. Victory has always been found, when found at all, on the other
side of the battle field.
The proposition underlying the anti-slavery movement was one of the
plainest that ever dropped from the lips of man. It was so simple and self-
evident that argument seemed a waste of breath, and appeal an insult to the
understanding, and yet this simple proposition held within itself an ex-
plosive force more powerful than dynamite—a force which divided and
drove asunder the nation, rent it in twain at the centre, and filled the land
with hostile armies. The fundamental proposition of anti-slavery was sim-
ply this: Every man is himself, or in other words, is his self, or, which is the
same thing, every man is the rightful owner of himself. Nothing could be
plainer than this, yet press and pulpit, church and State, saint and sinner,
North and South, denounced the proposition as full of mischief and one to
be put down at all hazards. Man’s right to his religious faith, to believe
what he could not do otherwise than believe, shared the same fate and filled
Europe with nearly a century of war. With these and other and similar
examples before us we are not to think it strange that the proposition to
enfranchise woman, to clothe her with all the rights and dignity of Ameri-
can citizenship, meets with resistance.
The fundamental proposition of the woman suffrage movement is
scarcely less simple than that of the anti-slavery movement. It assumes that
woman is herself. That she belongs to herself, just as fully as man belongs
to himself—that she is a person and has all the attributes of personality that
can be claimed by man, and that her rights of person are equal in all
respects to those of man. She has the same number of senses that dis-
tinguish man, and is like man a subject of human government, capable of
understanding, obeying and being affected by law. That she is capable of
forming an intelligent judgment as to the character of public men and
public measures, and she may exercise her right of choice in respect both to
the law and the lawmakers. Than all this nothing could be more simple or
more reasonable.
The generation that has come on the stage since the war can hardly now
realize, in view of the fundamental principles of American government,
that slavery ever existed here, that the pulpit and press, that the church and
the State ever defended it. So, when this battle for woman suffrage shall
have been fought and the victory won, men will marvel at the injustice and
stupidity which so long deprived American women of the ballot.
Let me say in conclusion, if human nature is totally depraved, if men
and women are incapable of thinking or doing anything but evil and that
continually, if the character of this government will inevitably be the
expression of this universal and innate depravity—then the less men and
women have to do with government the better. We should abandon our
Republican government, cease to elect men to office, and place ourselves
squarely under the Czar of Russia, the Pope of Rome, or some other
potentate who governs by divine right. But if, on the contrary, human
nature is more virtuous than vicious, as I believe it is, if governments are
best supported by the largest measure of virtue within their reach, if women
are equally virtuous with men, if the whole is greater than a part, if the
sense and sum of human goodness in man and woman combined is greater
than in that of either alone and separate, then the government that excludes
women from all participation in its creation, administration and perpetua-
tion, maims itself, deprives itself of one-half of all that is wisest and best
for its usefulness, success and perfection.