Today’s Supreme Court Dobbs decision gutting Roe v. Wade led me to publish this today. I had scheduled it for July 20, but I think today is the day.
On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass, a former slave and nationally recognized abolitionist during the 1850s, addressed the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, NY. He began his speech, predictably, by acknowledging that the meeting he is addressing was called to celebrate the 4th of July, the birthday of national independence and political freedom. His speech was an unremarkable, traditional, patriotic oration. In it, he heaped praise on the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence, and praised their willingness to risk their fortunes and their future by declaring themselves in rebellion.
In fact, there is little to note about this speech – except for one element that keeps popping up. In acknowledging and commemorating the occasion, he consistently uses the pronouns “you” and “your” rather than “we” and “our.” He identifies the event as the birthday of “your” national independence and “your” political freedom. Throughout the speech, he seems to be talking about a nation that belongs to his listeners rather than to him.
And of course, that was his point. In the next section of the speech, he reminds the Rochester ladies of the horrors of slavery. And then he hits his punchline:
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
As rhetoric, this was powerful. It was almost certainly not what the Rochester ladies were expecting. But Douglass had something to say, and he said it.
I have seen this speech before, but I reread it when I came across it recently, and it hit me a little differently. What did the 4th of July mean to the ladies in front of him? Independence didn’t change anything for them either. They were still not allowed to own property except under limited circumstances. They couldn’t vote or hold elective office. They could be married off to any man their fathers chose for them. They had to have sex with their husbands and bear as many babies as their husbands wanted. There’s a reason why husbands had multiple wives; their wives died in childbirth or as their bodies deteriorated from the rigors of pregnancy. Here are two examples of how this went in my family tree:
My 2nd great-grandfather James Abraham Workman (1827-1887) married twice; his first wife, Jemima Kitchen, died at the age of 29, less than a year after the birth of her 6th child (in 10 years). James then married 13-tyear-old Adeline Buck, who died at the age of 37, less than a year after the birth of her 10th child (in 20 years; she was 16 when she had her first child
My 3rd great-grandfather Johannes Georg Ilgenfritz (1750-1831) had 22 children with three wives. His first wife, Margaret Mummert, died at the age of 40 after having six children. His second wife, Keturah Clark, died at the age of 62 after having 11 children. His third wife, Permilia Mary Jarvis, married him when she was 20 years old and he was 66. She had five children with him before he died at the age of 81; all five of her children were younger than 11 when he died (the old goat).
The women who attended the first Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY, four years before Douglass’s speech to the Ladies of Rochester – July 20, 1848 – knew that the 4th of July hadn’t guaranteed anything for them, either. They issued a Declaration of Sentiments (modeled after the Declaration of Independence) and committed to secure women’s rights. Here’s what it said:
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.
We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves, by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled.
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men - both natives and foreigners.
Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.
He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes, with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master - the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.
He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes of divorce; in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women - the law, in all cases, going upon the false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.
After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.
He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.
He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction, which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education - all colleges being closed against her.
He allows her in Church as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.
He has created a false public sentiment, by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated but deemed of little account in man.
He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.
He has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation, - in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.
In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country.
Firmly relying upon the final triumph of the Right and the True, we do this day affix our signatures to this declaration.
The signatures of 68 people were appended to this document – including Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frederick Douglass. After the Civil War, however, Douglass distanced himself from the Women’s suffrage movement, saying at an 1869 meeting of the American Equal Rights Association, “I must say that I do not see how any one can pretend that there is the same urgency in giving the ballot to women as to the Negro. With us, the matter is a question of life and death.” This split over the urgency of rights for African American men versus the rights of women soon led to the dissolution of the American Equal Rights Association. Women would not gain the right to vote until 1920, and economic rights for women were not guaranteed for more than 50 years after that milestone. We see today that even these guarantees are wobbly.
The explicit rollback of protections for women’s rights in recent years – specifically the abhorrent Dobbs decision – emphasizes the secondary role allocated to women at the nation’s founding and continuing to today. If the courts really are going to bow to the God of “originalism,” anyone who’s not a white property-owning male is in trouble. That’s a majority of us, so far as I can tell.
So I’m going to start celebrating the 20th of July in addition to the 4th.
“What, to a woman, is your 4th of July?”
Powerful. This is a keeper. And a guide.
And on and on it goes….thanks, Karen.