7 Interesting facts about Frederick Douglass

By Michael Gryboski, Mainline Church Editor Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Supported women’s suffrage

A list of the signers of the Declaration of Sentiments, signed at the Seneca Falls Convention held at Wesley Chapel in 1848. | Wikimedia Commons/mcvy

Not only was Douglass a staunch supporter of desegregation, abolition and black suffrage, he was also a proponent of women’s suffrage.

Douglass spoke at the First Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, and helped to found the short-lived American Equal Rights Association with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

“In respect to political rights, we hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man. We go farther, and express our conviction that all political rights which it is expedient for man to exercise, it is equally so for women,” wrote Douglass in a piece for The North Star.

“All that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman; and if that government is only just which governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise, or a hand in making and administering the laws of the land.”