Nobody Can Be Represented by Anybody Else: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 15, 1873
NOBODY CAN BE REPRESENTED BY ANYBODY ELSE:
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS,
ON 15 DECEMBER 1873
Boston Woman's Journal, 20 December 1873. Another text in Boston Daily Globe, 16
December 1873.
Joining their call for woman suffrage with a celebration of the centennial
anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, the New England Woman Suffrage
Association held a meeting in Faneuil Hall on the afternoon of 15 December
1873. The hall, decorated with banners proclaiming “Taxation without repre-
sentation is tyranny” and “Governments derive their just power from the
consent of the governed,” was so densely packed with men and women, both
black and white, that one reporter observed that the crowd “surged and they
perspired, and had their corns stepped on.” Thomas W. Higginson presided
over the meeting, which attracted not only Douglass but also Wendell Phil-
lips, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucy Stone, and Julia Ward Howe. One speak-
er at the afternoon session, Mary Livermore, an Illinois reformer and suf-
fragist, summarized the meeting’s theme by acknowledging that “to-day,
notwithstanding this declaration of principles which has been sustained,
which is declared as underlying the American Government throughout the
length and breadth of the land, women are continually taxed and denied
representation.” Douglass’s brief presentation concluded the successful ses-
sion, marred only by a shortage of tea at the intermission. Holland, Frederick
Douglass, 329.
I am unexpectedly called upon, ladies and gentlemen, to say my word, and
I hardly know, in consideration of the fact that I am required to be in
another place in a few minutes, that I ought to occupy any of your time.1Douglass delivered a lecture on the career of John Brown at the North Russell Street Church in Boston on the evening of 15 December 1873. Boston Daily Globe, 15, 17 December 1873. I
was just meditating an escape—I am up to that trick, you know—when I
was called upon by your Chairman to say a few words to you.2Mary Ashton Rice Livermore (1820-1905) requested that Douglass address the meeting. Daughter of a Boston laborer, she received a broad liberal arts education at the Female Seminary in Charlestown, Massachusetts. After three years as a tutor on a Virginia plantation, she taught in Duxbury, Massachusetts, where in 1854 she married a local Universalist minister, Daniel Parker Livermore. In 1857 the Livermores moved to Chicago, where Daniel became the editor and Mary the assistant editor and manager of the New Covenant, a Universalist monthly magazine. During the Civil War she was an agent for the U.S. Sanitary Commission and played a leading role in raising funds and establishing auxiliaries for that organization throughout the Midwest. After the war Mrs. Livermore actively supported the woman suffrage movement. To promote that cause, in January 1869, she launched a newspaper, the Agitator, which in 1870 she merged with the Woman's Journal, the official voice of the American Woman Suffrage Association. Moving to Boston, she served as the editor for two years, after which she took up public lecturing. Her average schedule of 150 lectures a year from 1872 to 1895 earned her the sobriquet “Queen of the Platform." She remained a prominent leader in woman suffrage, temperance, and other reforms until her death. Mary A. Livermore, The Story of My Life; or, The Sunshine and Shadow of Seventy Years (Hartford, Conn., 1897); James et al., Notable American Women, 2: 410-13; NCAB, 11: 306-07. The only
thing that I can say in connection with this great subject has been well
said—better said, in fact—by others. I thought if I had an opportunity of
speaking here that I would call your attention to the wonderful improve-
ment in the condition of the colored man in this country since he has been
allowed to vote. However, before I had this illustration, before the experi-
ment was tried, it is due to myself to say that I was decidedly in favor of the
extension of suffrage to women. Indeed, from the beginning of my connec-
tion with the abolitionists I saw that the principle on which I demanded
freedom for the black man applied equally to women. (Applause.) I believe
that this government will never be in a healthy condition until all the good
people under it, and all the bad people under it, also, shall have the right at
least secured to them of bringing whatever of good or whatever of bad there
is in them into the government; and I am so free in my religious opinions,
so entirely free from that notion of the total depravity of man, and such a
believer in the preponderating good in human nature that I believe that all
the bad can be trusted with all of the good, that all the ignorance can be
trusted with all the intelligence, and that this government will never be
what it ought to be until all the people who live under it have some method
of diffusing or infusing themselves into the government. I am not giving
you much light on the subjects, I know, I am just giving you my creed. I
wonder why people make speeches at all, why they argue at all. I used to
wonder why men argued the right of the negro to freedom, and wondered
how men could even differ about it. The only idea the abolitionists ever
enunciated was so simple it did not require argument. It was just this, every
man is himself, that is all. Some of us say that every woman is herself, and
as nobody can be represented by anybody else, that therefore she should
have a voice in the government. I thank you for giving me an opportunity to
say at least that there are colored men in the country who have not forgotten
the rights of others in having received their own rights. (Applause.) I am
for woman’s voting, for woman’s education. I am for woman’s right to do
anything and everything in this world that she is capable of doing and doing
well. (Applause.)