Douglass Women

The critically acclaimed author of Voodoo Dreams delivers an inspired work of historical fiction about the warring passions that drove the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass and two women -- one black, one white -- who loved him. Douglass' Women reimagines the lives of an American hero, Frederick Douglass, and two women -- his wife and his mistress -- who loved him and lived in his shadow. Anna Douglass, a free woman of color, was Douglass' wife of forty-four years, who bore him five children. Ottilie Assing, a German-Jewish intellectual, provided him the companionship of the mind that he needed. Hurt by Douglass' infidelity, Anna rejected his notion that only literacy freed the mind. For her, familial love rivaled intellectual pursuits. Ottilie was raised by parents who embraced the ideal of free love, but found herself entrapped in an unfulfilling love triangle with America's most famous self-taught slave for nearly three decades. In her finest novel to date, Jewell Parker Rhodes vividly resurrects these two extraordinary women from history, portraying the life they led together under the same roof of the Douglass home. Here, fiery emotions of passion, jealousy, and resentment churn as the women discover an uneasy solidarity in shared love for an exceptional and powerful man. Douglass' Women fills the gaps and silences that history has left in an unforgettable epic full of heartache and triumph.

"This biography of the circle of women around Frederick Douglass [examines] the connections between his public and private life [and reveals] connections among enslaved women, free black women, abolitionist circles, and nineteenth-century politics and culture in the North and South before and after the Civil War"--

In his extensive writings, Frederick Douglass revealed little about his private life. His famous autobiographies present him overcoming unimaginable trials to gain his freedom and establish his identity-all in service to his public role as an abolitionist. But in both the public and domestic spheres, Douglass relied on a complicated array of relationships with women: white and black, slave-mistresses and family, political collaborators and intellectual companions, wives and daughters. And the great man needed them throughout a turbulent life that was never so linear and self-made as he often wished to portray it. In Women in the World of Frederick Douglass, Leigh Fought illuminates the life of the famed abolitionist off the public stage. She begins with the women he knew during his life as a slave: his mother, from whom he was separated; his grandmother, who raised him; his slave mistresses, including the one who taught him how to read; and his first wife, Anna Murray, a free woman who helped him escape to freedom and managed the household that allowed him to build his career. Fought examines Douglass's varied relationships with white women-including Maria Weston Chapman, Julia Griffiths, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Ottilie Assing--who were crucial to the success of his newspapers, were active in the antislavery and women's movements, and promoted his work nationally and internationally. She also considers Douglass's relationship with his daughter Rosetta, who symbolized her parents' middle class prominence but was caught navigating between their public and private worlds. Late in life, Douglass remarried to a white woman, Helen Pitts, who preserved his papers, home, and legacy for history. By examining the circle of women around Frederick Douglass, this work brings these figures into sharper focus and reveals a fuller and more complex image of the self-proclaimed "woman's rights man."

Rutgers University’s Douglass Residential College is the only college for women that is nested within a major public research university in the United States. Although the number of women’s colleges has plummeted from a high of 268 in 1960 to 38 in 2016, Douglass is flourishing as it approaches its centennial in 2018. To explore its rich history, Kayo Denda, Mary Hawkesworth, Fernanda H. Perrone examine the strategic transformation of Douglass over the past century in relation to continuing debates about women’s higher education. The Douglass Century celebrates the college’s longevity and diversity as distinctive accomplishments, and analyzes the contributions of Douglass administrators, alumnae, and students to its survival, while also investigating multiple challenges that threatened its existence. This book demonstrates how changing historical circumstances altered the possibilities for women and the content of higher education, comparing the Jazz Age, American the Great Depression, the Second World War, the post-war Civil Rights era, and the resurgence of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. Concluding in the present day, the authors highlight the college’s ongoing commitment to Mabel Smith Douglass’ founding vision, “to bring about an intellectual quickening, a cultural broadening in connection with specific training so that women may go out into the world fitted...for leadership...in the economic, political, and intellectual life of this nation.” In addition to providing a comprehensive history of the college, the book brings its subjects to life with eighty full-color images from the Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries.

In their long, continuing struggle for equality, American women have had to rely primarily on their own resources, which have been considerable. Yet many men have helped advance their cause. Perhaps foremost among them was the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass. According to the women of the time, Douglass was their preeminent male supporter. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, "He was the only man I ever saw who understood the degradation of the disfranchisement of women." This book collects the speeches and writings of Frederick Douglass on women's rights. Since suffrage was the major concern of the movement, the issue of voting was primary among Douglass's themes; however, he also spoke and wrote resolutely on the need for women to reach their full potential by participating in every phase of American society and in every aspect of decision-making. No one was more insistent that the oppression of women violated the principles proclaimed at the birth of the American Republic. He was, in short, in favor of "absolute justice and perfect equality" for women. And because of his pride in his own race, he never failed to remind the white women who led the movement that black women endured an even greater oppression in white, male-dominated society than they did. Always eloquent and rarely less than inspiring, Frederick Douglass on Women's Rights presents the words of one of America's greatest spokesmen on one of the most important issues of the nineteenth century, words which still ring with truth and power today.

Frederick Douglass was unquestionably the foremost black American of the nineteenth century. The extraordinary life of this former slave turned abolitionist orator, newspaper editor, social reformer, race leader, and Republican party advocate has inspired many biographies over the years. This, however, is the first full-scale study of the origins, contours, development, and significance of Douglass's thought. Brilliant and to a large degree self-taught, Douglass personified intellectual activism; he possessed a sincere concern for the uses and consequences of ideas. Both his people's struggle for liberation and his individual experiences, which he envisioned as symbolizing that struggle, provided the basis and structure for his intellectual maturation. As a representative American, he internalized and, thus, reflected major currents in the contemporary American mind. As a representative Afro-American, he revealed in his thinking the deep-seated influence of race on Euro-American, Afro-American, or, broadly conceived, American consciousness. He sought to resolve in his thinking the dynamic tension between his identities as a black and as an American. Martin assesses not only how Douglass dealt with this enduring conflict, but also the extent of his success. An inveterate belief in a universal and egalitarian humanism unified Douglass's thought. This grand organizing principle reflected his intellectual roots in the three major traditions of mid-nineteenth-century American thought: Protestant Christianity, the Enlightenment, and romanticism. Together, these influences buttressed his characteristic optimism. Although nineteenth-century Afro-American intellectual history derived its central premises and outlook from concurrent American intellectual history, it offered a searching critique of the latter and its ramifications. How to square America's rhetoric of freedom, equality, and justice with the reality of slavery and racial prejudice was the difficulty that confronted such Afro-American thinkers as Douglass.

Analyzes John Calvin's doctrine of Christian freedom, describes his teachings about women's public role, and examines its pertinence to women's ordination

Frederick Douglass was born enslaved in February 1818, but from this most humble of beginnings, he rose to become a world-famous orator, newspaper editor, and champion of the rights of women and African Americans. He not only survived slavery to live in freedom but also became an outspoken critic of the institution and an active participant in the U.S. political system. Douglass advised presidents of the United States and formally represented his country in the diplomatic corps. He was the most prominent African American activist of the nineteenth century, and he left a treasure trove of documentary evidence detailing his life in slavery and achievements in freedom. This volume gathers and interprets valuable selections from a variety of Douglass’s writings, including speeches, editorials, correspondence, and autobiographies.