Frederick Douglass Quotes
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 comprehended it. It is prescribed upon all the powers and faculties of her soul, and no custom, law nor usage can ever destroy it.
Frederick Douglasss, ~1817-1895, Abolitionist & Editor, Recorder of Deeds, District of Columbia, U. S. Minister to Haiti, Speech, International Council of Women, Washington DC, March, 1888
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This remarkable statement was written in about 1840 and there was probably then few people of either gender who would think such a thing possible.
He was very conservative in almost all things, but here and with poverty (see {638805}) he was far ahead of his time.
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Likewise, Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave.