LET WOMAN TAKE HER RIGHTS: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN
WORCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS, ON 24 OCTOBER 1850

New York Daily Tribune, 26 October 1850. Another text in National Anti-Slavery Standard, 31 October 1850.

Douglass attended the two-day National Women Rights Convention, held in
Worcester, Massachusetts, on 23-24 October 1850. An estimated 250 delegates
from ten states assembled at Brinley Hall, and Paulina Wright Davis of
Providence, Rhode Island, presided. Charles C. Burleigh, Lucretia Mott,
W. H. Channing, Abby K. Foster, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd GarrisonGarrison, William Lloyd

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was the foremost white abolitionist of the nineteenth century and was credited with the discovery of Douglass as a speaker at an antislavery meeting in Nantucket in 1841. He began his career as an apprentice printer on the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald at the age of thirteen. Garrison became editor of the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, but the paper closed within a year. He was then associated with a series of periodicals in Boston that advocated reform before Benjamin Lundy offered the young journalist the opportunity to write for his antislavery newspaper. Garrison joined Lundy in editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1829, during the last year of the paper's 1821-1830 run. In 1830 a libel suit against the editors forced the paper to close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted the wealthy merchants of New York and Boston in order to start the Liberator (1831-65), a weekly journal based in Boston in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison's brand of abolition condemned any institution that would tolerate the existence of slavery, including churches, political parties. and even the United States itself and any scheme aimed at removing black people from the country. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the public's awareness that slavery was morally wrong and thereby force its end in an almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and black antislavery advocates but earned him many enemies among those only moderately opposed to slavery and slaveholders alike. Seeing the need for greater action and organization beyond the pages of the Liberator; Garrison joined with other abolitionists to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. Two years later he helped found the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and notorious speaker George Thompson to the United States for a tour. Garrison also dedicated himself to women's rights, encouraging women to enter the public sphere by inviting them, via the Liberator, to form female antislavery societies. In addition to the thirty-three women's antislavery societies that flourished by 1838, Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society welcomed women as well as blacks into its ranks. However, female delegates were excluded from the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London. The issue of women's participation in the antislavery movement and Garrison's absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who opposed women's acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics toward abolition, broke with Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, forming the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, or the "New Organization" in 1841. Garrison's ideas were so closely associated with the "Old Organization" that the American Anti-Slavery Society became known simply as the "Garrisonians." With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life's work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 188589); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928-36), 7:168-72. ,
Lucy Stone, and Douglass were among the speakers who addressed the convention.
Lib., 1 November 1850; New York Herald, 25, 26, 28 October
1850; New York Daily Tribune, 25 October 1850; Quarles, FD, 134-36;
Harriet H. Robinson, Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement (Boston,
1881), 208-14.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS addressed the Convention in a forcible and interesting
manner, and with much eloquence. He said, this Convention has now
been in session two days, and no one has attempted to offer anything

against the sentiments and principles advanced here. It is not because there
is no opposition to this movement; but because the truths on which it is
founded are invulnerable. The arguments advanced cannot be met, except
by ridicule, and this will be the great weapon that will be used against us.
He said he had some experience of the character of public opinion. He had
been its victim, and the lesson he had learned was to take his rights
wherever he could get them—to assume them, at any rate, as properly his.
This principle of action had brought him into some difficulties: he had been
turned out of railroad cars in Massachusetts, and out of steamboat cabins,
and knocked on the head. But he found the continual exercise of his rights
was wearing out their prejudice against color. He closed by urging strongly
that women should take their rights. Seize hold of those which are most
strongly contested. You have already free access to the paths of literature;
Women may write books of poetry, travels, &c. and they will be read with
avidity. Let them strike out in some other path where they are not now
allowed to go. If there is some kind of business from which they are
excluded, let some heroic Woman enter upon that business, as some of
these noble Women have entered upon the practice of medicine. Let
Woman take her rights, and then she shall be free.