FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO ELIZABETH CADY STANTON¹Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) was the best-known feminist of her day. Born in Johnstown, New York, and educated at Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary, Stanton developed an interest in abolition and other reforms during visits to the home of her cousin Gerrit Smith. Stanton became determined to work to advance the status of women when she and other female delegates were barred from the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840. Eight years later, Stanton, along with Lucretia Mott, organized the first-ever women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, where Stanton had settled with her husband, the antislavery politician Henry B. Stanton. During Reconstruction, she opposed the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, since they granted equal rights and suffrage to black males but ignored all females. She held to this position in the , the woman suffrage weekly she edited with Parker Pillsbury, and in the platform of the National Woman Suffrage Association, which she and Susan B. Anthony founded in 1869. Besides presiding over that organization for more than two decades, Stanton wrote numerous articles and several books, including the multivolume in collaboration with Anthony and Matilda Gage. Alma Lutz, (New York, 1940); Lois W. Banner, (Boston, 1980); Edward T. James et al., eds., , 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 3: 342–47.

Washington, D.C. 16 February 1866.

DEAR MRS STANTON:

Thank you for your letter giving me an account of the launching of the
good ship “” and the names and Character of her
officers.²During the Civil War, leaders of the antebellum women’s rights movement largely rechanneled their energies into groups like the Women’s Loyal National League, which campaigned for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. After that goal was achieved in 1865 and discussions arose about another amendment to ensure equal citizenship for the freedpeople, early feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone protested any wording of the new amendment that would restrict it to “males.” In December 1866, Wendell Phillips, the president of the American Anti-Slavery Society, rebuffed proposals from Stanton to merge the campaigns for black and woman suffrage. The following month, Phillips helped delay debate on Stephen Foster’s proposal to remake the abolitionist organization into an “equal rights” organization until the society’s May anniversary-week meeting. Stanton and Anthony then organized the New York State Equal Rights Association, with Douglass as its vice president, to pressure Phillips. They also issued a call for the Eleventh National Women’s Rights Convention to meet in New York City during the 1866 anniversary week. When Phillips outmaneuvered the efforts of Stanton and Anthony to reorient the American Anti-Slavery Society’s goals, the women used their own convention to launch the American Equal Rights Association the following day. Its purpose was to battle for “equal rights to all American citizens, especially the right of suffrage, irrespective of race, color, or sex.” Douglass was selected as one of its vice presidents. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., , 6 vols. (Rochester, 1881–1922), 2: 152–53; Faye E. Dudden, (New York, 2011), 70–87. No vessel like her has been given to the sea since Noah’s Ark³In Genesis, God ordered Noah to construct a gigantic ark in which to save his family and a remnant of all the world’s animals from a great flood to be inflicted on the earth as punishment for humanity’s sins. Gen. 6–9.—
Without the presence of woman the Ark would have been a failure. I have
about made up my mind that if you can forgive me for being a negro—I
cannot do less than to forgive you for being a woman.

Very Truly yours

FREDK DOUG LASS

ALS: Theodore Stanton Manuscripts, Rutgers University.