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370

LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

found heritage of freedom. They met me as a brother, and by their kind
consideration did much to make endurable the rebuffs I encountered elsewhere.
At the anti-slavery office in Providence, Rhode Island, I remember with a
peculiar interest Lucinda Wilmarth, whose acceptance of life's duties and
labors, and whose heroic struggle with sickness and death, taught me more
than one lesson; and Amarancy Paine, never weary in performing any
service, however arduous, which fidelity to the slave demanded of her. Then
there were Phebe Jackson, Elizabeth Chace, the Sisson sisters, the Chases,
the Greenes, the Browns, the Goulds, the Shroves, the Anthonys, the Roses,
the Fayerweathers, the Motts, the Earles, the Spooners, the Southwicks, the
Buffums, the Fords, the Wilburs, the Henshaws, the Burgesses, and others
whose names are lost, but whose deeds are living yet in the regenerated life
of our new Republic, cleansed from the curse and sin of slavery.

Observing woman's agency, devotion, and efficiency in pleading the
cause of the slave, gratitude for this high service early moved me to give
favorable attention to the subject of what is called "Woman's Rights," and
caused me to be denominated a woman's-rights-man. I am glad to say I have
never been ashamed to be thus designated. Recognizing not sex, nor physical
strength, but moral intelligence and the ability to discern right from wrong,
good from evil, and the power to choose between them, as the true basis of
Republican government, to which all are alike subject, and bound alike to
obey, I was not long in reaching the conclusion that there was no foundation
in reason or justice for woman's exclusion from the right of choice in the
selection of the persons who should frame the laws, and thus shape the
destiny of all the people, irrespective of sex.

In a conversation with Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, when she was yet
a young lady, and an earnest abolitionist, she was at the pains of setting
before me, in a very strong light, the wrong and injustice of this exclusion. I
could not meet her arguments except with the shallow plea of "custom,"
"natural division of duties," "indelicacy of woman's taking part in politics,"
the common talk of "woman 's sphere," and the like, all of which that able
woman, who was then no less logical than now, brushed away by those
arguments which she has so often and effectively used since, and which no man
has yet successfully refuted. If intelligence is the only true and rational basis
of government, it follows that that is the best government which draws its
life and power from the largest sources of wisdom, energy, and goodness at
its command. The force of this reasoning would be easily comprehended and
readily assented to in any case involving the employment of physical
strength. We should all see the folly and madness of attempting to accom-