Give Women Fair Play: An Address Delivered in Washington, D.C., on March 31, 1888
GIVE WOMEN FAIR PLAY: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED
IN WASHINGTON, D.C., ON 31 MARCH 1888
Boston Woman's Journal, 14, 21 April 1888. Other texts in Speech File, reel 16, frames
306–09, 310–15, 320–23, reel 19, frames 765–76, FD Papers, DLC; Foner, Life and
Writings, 4: 448–54, misdated April 1888; Foner, Douglass on Women's Rights, 109–15,
misdated April 1888.
The International Council of Women met in Washington, D.C., between 25
March and 1 April 1888 with representatives attending from the United
States, France, England, Ireland, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and
India. Divided into sixteen different sessions with some eighty speakers, the
major activities of the convention occurred at Albaugh’s Grand Opera House.
Douglass sat on the platform during many of the sessions and occasionally
made brief remarks to the audience. The text that follows is his principal
address, delivered on 31 March 1888, at a morning meeting designated “Pi-
oneers’ Day." Susan B. Anthony called that meeting to order. The audience
observed a moment of silence in memory of Lucretia Mott and then sang John
G. Whittier’s hymn, “The Reformers.” The session’s first speaker was Eliz-
abeth Cady Stanton who reminisced about the pioneers in the woman suffrage
movement. After John W. Hutchinson sang an original song, “Greeting to the
Pioneers,” Anthony introduced Douglass. Lucy Stone, Henry B. Blackwell,
Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Robert Purvis, Mary Grew, Matilda Joslyn
Gage, Samuel C. Pomeroy, and May Wright Sewall followed Douglass.
When Anthony asked Amy Post to stand and described her relation to Doug-
lass, he added his own brief words of praise for the old friend of Rochester
days. The meeting concluded with Anthony reading letters received from
those unable to attend the celebration and the singing of “Auld Lang Syne” by
the audience. The Washington Post commented favorably on the meeting and
called the presence of Douglass and Purvis there “poetic justice,” on account
of the earlier aid of many women to the abolitionist movement. Susan B.
Anthony to Douglass, 6 February 1888, Douglass to [Caroline F.] Putnam, 16
April 1888, General Correspondence File, reel 4, frames 712-21, 764-65,
FD Papers, DLC; Washington Post, 27 March, 1 April 1888; Washington
National Republican, 1, 4 April 1888; Boston Woman’s Journal, 7 April
1888; Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, 4: 124-37; Holland,
Frederick Douglass, 366-67.
Mrs. President,1The International Council of Women chose Elizabeth Cady Stanton to be the president of its Washington meeting. Susan B. Anthony, however, presided over the Pioneers' Day session of the council and Douglass might be referring to either woman. Boston Woman's Journal, 14 April 1888. Ladies and Gentlemen: I come to this platform with
unusual diffidence. Although I have long been identified with the Woman’s
Suffrage movement, and have often spoken in its favor, I am somewhat at a
loss to know what to say on this really great and uncommon occasion,
where so much has been said.
When I look around on this assembly, and see the many able and
eloquent women, full of the subject, ready to speak, and who only need the
opportunity to impress this audience with their views and thrill them with
“thoughts that breathe and words that burn,"2Douglass quotes from the final stanza of “The Progress of Posey," by English poet Thomas Gray (1716-71). Edmund Gosse, ed., The Works of Thomas Gray in Prose and Verse, 4 vols. (New York, 1895). 1: 36. I do not feel like taking up
more than a very small space of your time and attention, and shall not. I
would not, even now, presume to speak, but for the circumstance of my
early connection with the cause, and of having been called upon to do so by
one whose voice in this Council we all gladly obey.3Susan B. Anthony had written to Douglass the preceding month to invite him to speak at the Pioneers' Day ceremonies at the meeting of the International Council of Women and she called upon him at that session to speak. Susan B. Anthony to Douglass, 6 February 1888, reel 4, frames 712-21, General Correspondence File, FD Papers, DLC; Boston Woman's Journal, 14 April 1888. Men have very little
business here as speakers, anyhow; and if they come here at all they should
take back benches and wrap themselves in silence. For this is an Interna-
tional Council, not of men, but of women, and woman should have all the
say in it. This is her day in court.
I do not mean to exalt the intellect of woman above man’s; but I have
heard many men speak on this subject, some of them the most eloquent to
be found anywhere in the country; and I believe no man, however gifted
with thought and speech, can voice the wrongs and present the demands of
women with the skill and effect, with the power and authority of woman
herself. The man struck is the man to cry out. Woman knows and feels her
wrongs as man cannot know and feel them, and she also knows as well as
he can know, what measures are needed to redress them. I grant all the
claims at this point. She is her own best representative. We can neither
speak for her, nor vote for her, nor act for her, nor be responsible for her;
and the thing for men to do in the premises is just to get out of her way and
give her the fullest opportunity to exercise all the powers inherent in her
individual personality, and allow her to do it as she herself shall elect to
exercise them. Her right to be and to do is as full, complete and perfect as
the right of any man on earth. I say of her, as I say of the colored people,
“Give her fair play, and hands off.”
There was a time when, perhaps, we men could help a little. It was
when this woman suffrage cause was in its cradle, when it was not big
enough to go alone, when it had to be taken in the arms of its mother from
Seneca Falls, N.Y., to Rochester, N.Y., for baptism. I then went along
with it and offered my services to help it, for then it needed help; but now it
can afford to dispense with me and all of my sex.4Douglass attended the first women‘s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, on 19-20 July 1848 and thirteen days later attended a second one held in Rochester, New York. NS, 28 July, 11 August 1848. Then its friends were
few—now its friends are many. Then it was wrapped in obscurity—now it
is lifted in sight of the whole civilized world, and people of all lands and
languages give it their hearty support. Truly the change is vast and wonder-
ful.
I thought my eye of faith was tolerably clear when I attended those
meetings in Seneca Falls and Rochester, but it was far too dim to see at the
end of forty years a result so imposing as this International Council, and to
see yourself and Miss Anthony alive and active in its proceedings. Of
course, I expected to be alive myself, and am not surprised to find myself
so; for such is, perhaps, the presumption and arrogance common to my sex.
Nevertheless, I am very glad to see you here to-day, and to see this grand
assembly of women. I am glad that you are its president. No manufactured
“boom,” or political contrivance, such as make presidents elsewhere, has
made you president of this assembly of women in this Capital of the
Nation. You hold your place by reason of eminent fitness, and I give you
joy that your life and labors in the cause of woman are thus crowned with
honor and glory. This I say in spite of the warning given us by Miss
Anthony’s friend against mutual admiration.
There may be some well-meaning people in this audience who have
never attended a woman suffrage convention, never heard a woman suf-
frage speech, never read a woman suffrage newspaper, and they may be
surprised that those who speak here do not argue the question. It may be
kind to tell them that our cause has passed beyond the period of arguing.
The demand of the hour is not argument, but assertion, firm and inflexible
assertion, assertion which has more than the force of an argument. If there
is any argument to be made, it must be made by the opponents, not by the
friends of woman suffrage. Let those who want argument examine the
ground upon which they base their claim to the right to vote. They will find
that there is not one reason, not one consideration, which they can urge in
support of man’s claim to vote, which does not equally support the right of
woman to vote.
There is to-day, however, a special reason for omitting argument. This
is the end of the fourth decade of the woman suffrage movement, a kind of
jubilee which naturally turns our minds to the past.
Ever since this Council has been in session, my thoughts have been
reverting to the past. I have been thinking more or less, of the scene
presented forty years ago in the little Methodist Church at Seneca Falls, the
manger in which this organized suffrage movement was born. It was a very
small thing then. It was not then big enough to be abused, or loud enough to
make itself heard outside, and only a few of those who saw it had any
notion that the little thing would live. I have been thinking, too, of the
strong conviction, the noble courage, the sublime faith in God and man it
required at that time to set this suffrage ball in motion. The history of the
world has given to us many sublime undertakings, but none more sublime
than this. It was a great thing for the friends of peace to organize in
opposition to war; it was a great thing for the friends of temperance to
organize against intemperance; it was a great thing for humane people to
organize in opposition to slavery; but it was a much greater thing, in view
of all the circumstances, for woman to organize herself in opposition to her
exclusion from participation in government. The reason is obvious. War,
intemperance and slavery are open, undisguised, palpable evils. The best
feelings of human nature revolt at them. We could easily make men see the
misery, the debasement, the terrible suffering caused by intemperance; we
could easily make men see the desolation wrought by war and the hell-
black horrors of chattel slavery; but the case was different in the movement
for woman suffrage. Men took for granted all that could be said against
intemperance, war and slavery. But no such advantage was found in the
beginning of the cause of suffrage for women. On the contrary, everything
in her condition was supposed to be lovely, just as it should be. She had no
rights denied, no wrongs to redress. She herself had no suspicion but that
all was going well with her. She floated along on the tide of life as her
mother and grandmother had done before her, as in a dream of Paradise.
Her wrongs, if she had any, were too occult to be seen, and too light to be
felt. It required a daring voice and a determined hand to awake her from this
delightful dream and call the nation to account for the rights and oppor-
tunities of which it was depriving her. It was well understood at the begin-
ning that woman would not thank us for disturbing her by this call to duty,
and it was known that man would denounce and scorn us for such a daring
innovation upon the established order of things. But this did not appall or
delay the word and work.
At this distance of time from that convention at Rochester, and in view
of the present position of the question, it is hard to realize the moral courage
it required to launch this unwelcome movement. Any man can be brave
when the danger is over, go to the front door when there is no resistance,
rejoice when the battle is fought and the victory is won; but it is not so easy
to venture upon a field untried with one-half the whole world against you,
as these women did.
Then who were we, for I count myself in, who did this thing? We were
few in numbers, moderate in resources, and very little known in the world.
The most that we had to commend us was a firm conviction that we were in
the right, and a firm faith that the right must ultimately prevail. But the case
was well considered. Let no man imagine that the step was taken recklessly
and thoughtlessly. Mrs. Stanton had dwelt upon it at least six years before
she declared it in the Rochester convention. Walking with her from the
house of Joseph and Thankful Southwick,5Born in South Danvers, Massachusetts, Joseph Southwick (1791-1861) was a prominent Quaker abolitionist and merchant. He resided for a time in Maine but settled in Boston around the early 1830s and participated in numerous business enterprises. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and a longtime officer of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. In 1835, he and his wife Thankful Southwick gave refuge to British abolitionist George Thompson during the violent Boston riot. The Southwick home on Sumner Street was a frequent gathering place for Garrisonian abolitionists, including Douglass. Although Southwick was openly critical of disunionism, William Lloyd Garrison still spoke respectfully of him at his funeral. NASS, 2 February 1867; Douglass, Life and Times, 520; Garrison and Garrison, Garrison Life, 1: 396, 2: 46-48. 3: 100, 4: 412; Walter M. Merrill and Louis Ruchames, eds., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971–81), 2: 80. two of the noblest people I ever
knew, Mrs. Stanton, with an earnestness that I shall never forget, unfolded
her views on this woman question precisely as she has in this Council.6The precise date of this meeting cannot be confirmed although both Douglass and Stanton recalled the incident in later years. In 1843 Stanton moved to Boston where her husband, Henry B. Stanton, had established a law practice the previous year. She was a frequent visitor at that time to the home of Joseph and Thankful Southwick, a Quaker couple long active in Boston Garrisonian circles. Stanton attended several antislavery meetings while in Boston and at one of them heard Douglass for the first time and soon after revealed to him in a conversation her desire to hold a women's rights convention. Douglass, Life and Times, 521; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897 (1898; New York, 1971), 126; Alma Lutz, Created Equal: A Biography of EIizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815–1902 (New York: 1940), 38–39; Lois W. Banner, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical for Woman's Rights (Boston, 1980), 126.
This was six and forty years ago, and it was not until six years after, that she
ventured to make her formal, pronounced and startling demand for the
ballot. She had, as I have said, considered well, and knew something of
what would be the cost of the reform she was inaugurating. She knew the
ridicule, the rivalry, the criticism and the bitter aspersions which she and
her co-laborers would have to meet and to endure. But she saw more clearly
than most of us that the vital point to be made prominent, and the one that
included all others, was the ballot, and she bravely said the word. It was not
only necessary to break the silence of woman and make her voice heard,
but she must have a clear, palpable and comprehensive measure set before
her, one worthy of her highest ambition and her best exertions,. and hence
the ballot was brought to the front.
There are few facts in my humble history to which I look back with
more satisfaction than to the fact, recorded in the history of the Woman
Suffrage Movement, that I was sufficiently enlightened at that early day,
and when only a few years from slavery, to support your resolution for
woman suffrage. I have done very little in this world in which to glory
except this one act—and I certainly glory in that. When I ran away from
slavery, 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.
In estimating the forces with which this suffrage cause has had to
contend during these forty years, the fact should be remembered that
relations of long standing beget a character in the parties to them in favor of
their continuance. Time itself is a conservative power—a very conser-
vative power. One shake of his hoary locks will sometimes paralyze the
hand and palsy the tongue of the reformer. The relation of man to woman
has the advantage of all the ages behind it. Those who oppose a readjust-
ment of this relation tell us that what is always was and always will be,
world without end. But we have heard this old argument before, and if we
live very long we shall hear it again. When any aged error shall be assailed,
and any old abuse is to be removed, we shall meet this same old argument.
Man has been so long the king and woman the subject—man has been so
long accustomed to command and woman to obey—that both parties to the
relation have been hardened into their respective places, and thus has been
piled up a mountain of iron against woman’s enfranchisement.
The same thing confronted us in our conflicts with slavery. Long years
ago Henry Clay said, on the floor of the American Senate, “I know there is
a visionary dogma that man cannot hold property in man,” and, with a
brow of defiance, he said, “That is property which the law makes property.
Two hundred years of legislation has sanctioned and sanctified negro slaves
as property.”7Douglass quotes Henry Clay's address on the issue of antislavery petitions delivered in the U.S. Senate on 7 February 1839. Congressional Globe, 25th Cong., 3d sess., 357–58; Speech of Mr. Clay of Kentucky, on the Subject of Abolition Petitions, Delivered in the Senate of the United States, February 7, 1839 (Washington, D.C., 1839), 11. But neither the power of time nor the might of legislation has
been able to keep life in that stupendous barbarism.
The universality of man’s rule over woman is another factor in the
resistance to the woman suffrage movement. We are pointed to the fact that
men have not only always ruled over women, but that they do so rule
everywhere, and they easily think that a thing that is done everywhere must
be right. Though the fallacy of this reasoning is too transparent to need
refutation, it still exerts a powerful influence. Even our good Brother
Jasper yet believes, with the ancient church, that the sun “do move,”
notwithstanding all the astronomers of the world are against him.8An allusion to the sermon, “The Sun Do Move,” by the Reverend John Jasper. One
year ago I stood on the Pincio in Rome and witnessed the unveiling of the
statue of Galileo.9In his travel diary, Douglass recalls attending the dedication of a granite monument to Galileo on 21 April 1887 on the Pincian Hill in Rome. He also noted that “there was neither prayer nor priests imployed in its unveiling[.] for the monument is an honor to science and not to superstition." FD Diary, reel 1, frame 37, FD Papers, DLC. It was an imposing sight. At no time before had Rome
been free enough to permit such a statue to be placed within her walls. It is
now there, not with the approval of the Vatican. No priest took part in the
ceremonies. It was all the work of laymen. One or two priests passed the
statue with averted eyes, but the great truths of the solar system were not
angry at the sight, and the same will be true when woman shall be clothed,
as she will yet be, with all the rights of American citizenship.
All good causes are mutually helpful. The benefits accruing from this
movement for the equal rights of woman are not confined or limited to
woman only. They will be shared by every effort to promote the progress
and welfare of mankind everywhere and in all ages. It was an example and
a prophecy of what can be accomplished against strongly opposing forces,
against time-hallowed abuses, against deeply intrenched error, against
world-wide usage, and against the settled judgment of mankind, by a few
earnest women, clad only in the panoply of truth, and determined to live
and die in what they considered a righteous cause.
I do not forget the thoughtful remark of our president in the opening
address to this International Council, reminding us of the incompleteness
of our work.10Douglass alludes to the welcoming address by Elizabeth Cady Stanton to the first formal session of the International Council of Women on the morning of 26 March 1888. Boston Woman's Journal, 31 March 1888. The remark was wise and timely. Nevertheless, no man can
compare the present with the past, the obstacles that then opposed us, and
the influences that now favor us, the meeting in the little Methodist chapel
forty years ago, and the Council in this vast theatre to-day, without admit-
ting that woman’s cause is already a brilliant success. But, however this
may be, and whatever the future may have in store for us, one thing is
certain—this new revolution in human thought will never go backward.1111. Douglass paraphrases a comment from William H. Seward’s “Irrepressible Conflict" speech delivered in Rochester, New York, on 25 October 1858. Seward, Irrepressible Conflict, 7.
When a great truth once gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can
imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. It is bound to go on till it
becomes the thought of the world. Such a truth is woman’s right to equal
liberty with man. She was born with it. It was hers before she com-
prehended it. It is inscribed upon all the powers and faculties of her soul,
and no custom, law nor usage can ever destroy it. Now that it has got fairly
fixed in the minds of the few, it is bound to become fixed in the minds of the
many, and be supported at last by a great cloud of witnesses, which no man
can number and no power can withstand.
The women who have thus far carried on this agitation have already
embodied and illustrated Theodore Parker’s three grades of human great-
ness. The first is greatness in executive and administrative ability; second,
greatness in the ability to organize; and thirdly, in the ability to discover
truth.12Theodore Parker suggested these classifications of human greatness in a memorial sermon for John Quincy Adams in 1848. Theodore Parker, Historic Americans, edited by Samuel A. Eliot (Boston, 1908), 204–12. Wherever these three elements of power are combined in any
movement, there is a reasonable ground to believe in its final success; and
these elements of power have been manifest in the women who have had
the movement in hand from the beginning. They are seen in the order which
has characterized the proceedings of this Council. They are seen in the
depth and comprehensiveness of the discussions had upon them in this
Council. They are seen in the fervid eloquence and downright earnestness
with which women advocate their cause. They are seen in the profound
attention with which woman is heard in her own behalf. They are seen in
the steady growth and onward march of the movement, and they will be
seen in the final triumph of woman’s cause, not only in this country, but
throughout the world.
[Speeches by Lucy Stone, Henry B. Blackwell, Antoinette Brown
Blackwell, and Robert Purvis; song by Ormiston Chant; speeches by Mary
Grew, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Samuel C. Pomeroy, May Wright Sewall, and
Susan B. Anthony]
Mr. DOUGLASS—I only want to say that all that Miss Anthony has said
of Amy Post,13Amy Kirby Post (1802–89) was born in Jericho, New York and married Isaac Post, the husband of her deceased sister, in 1828. Originally Hicksite Quakers, the Posts left that denomination in 1845 because they felt their membership in it impeded their abolitionist activities. Three years later, Margaret Fox converted both to spiritualism. A mainstay of many Rochester reform efforts, Amy Post also served as a vice president of the Garrisonian American Anti-Slavery Society in the 1850s and 1860s. Douglass first met the Posts during a lecture tour of the West in 1843 and their friendship was one of the factors that led him to choose Rochester as the site for his newspaper. Douglass to Amy Post, 28 April 1846, 28 October 1847, 22 April 1849, 26 January 1868, 15 January 1877, 14 July 1882, Isaac and Amy Post Family Papers, NRU; Nancy A. Hewitt, Woman's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), 143, 184, 188, 190, 258; Douglass, Life and Times, 255–56, 293, 505; DAB, 15: 117. and more than all she said, and more than all that anybody
can say in her praise, will not be too much. Her home, her house, her
shelter, as it has been well said, has been the shelter of the poor castout.
The Indian, the African, the despised of every class, have been with Isaac
Post14Isaac Post (1798–1872) was the husband of Amy Post and a fellow Garrisonian abolitionist and Underground Railroad agent. Born to a family of Hicksite Quaker farmers on Long Island, Post moved to Rochester in 1836 and became a prosperous druggist. After his conversion to spiritualism in 1848, he became a well-known medium. Douglass, Life and Times, 255-56, 293, 300; Merrill and Ruchames, Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 5: 157; ACAB, 5: 84; DAB, 15: 117. and Amy Post. They have found shelter with them, and I rejoice to
see her here to-day, because she was the first in whose eyes I found
sympathy and from whose lips I heard a word of cheer after I escaped the
chains of slavery.