I took Kai, EV, and Eloise and we enjoyed our nearly two hours spent with them!
The first nearly 90 minutes was them reminiscing about their lives. Mr. Douglass shared how he learned his ABC's - how he learned a few letters and then would "bet" his "young masters" he knew a few to get them to show him more. About his mother who was not done nursing him when she was sold to another plantation 12 miles away, and how he has only a few memories of seeing her by firelight after she'd walked 12 miles to rock him to sleep, and how she was gone in the morning, walking the 12 miles back to where she "belonged." He heard how he had only 2 shirts and not a pair of pants until he was 8 years old. We learned how his freedom was purchased for $750 with money raised by others.
Mr. Douglass even called Eloise and another young man up on stage to help him recite the first poem he put to memory.
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| There she is! And it was Eloise's FIRST day with her new glasses! After, she said a few people told her she did a good job. She loves that kind of attention! (And she said she was so glad she had her glasses so she could see the actors' expressions from where we were seated. |
Later in the program he recited a part of the speech he gave at a conference on women's suffrage. It made me want to stand and applaud and shout amen. (It really made me want to share it with my Relief Society sisters AND the male church leadership!) In fact, I've gone and found the words that thrilled me, and here they are:
When I look around on this assembly, and see the many able and eloquent women, full of the subject, ready to speak, and who only need the opportunity to impress this audience with their views and thrill them with “thoughts that breathe and words that burn,” I do not feel like taking up more than a very small space of your time and attention, and shall not.
Men have very little business here as speakers, anyhow; and if they come here at all they should take back benches and wrap themselves in silence. For this is an International Council, not of men, but of women, and woman should have all the say in it. This is her day in court. I do not mean to exalt the intellect of woman above man’s; but I have heard many men speak on this subject, some of them the most eloquent to be found anywhere in the country; and I believe no man, however gifted with thought and speech, can voice the wrongs and present the demands of women with the skill and effect, with the power and authority of woman herself. The man struck is the man to cry out. Woman knows and feels her wrongs as man cannot know and feel them, and she also knows as well as he can know, what measures are needed to redress them. I grant all the claims at this point. She is her own best representative. We can neither speak for her, nor vote for her, nor act for her, nor be responsible for her; and the thing for men to do in the premises is just to get out of her way and give her the fullest opportunity to exercise all the powers inherent in her individual personality, and allow her to do it as she herself shall elect to exercise them. Her right to be and to do is as full, complete and perfect as the right of any man on earth. I say of her, as I say of the colored people, “Give her fair play, and hands off.”
The demand of the hour is not argument, but assertion, firm and inflexible assertion, assertion which has more than the force of an argument. If there is any argument to be made, it must be made by opponents, not by the friends of woman suffrage. Let those who want argument examine the ground upon which they base their claim to the right to vote. They will find that there is not one reason, not one consideration, which they can urge in support of man’s claim to vote, which does not equally support the right of woman to vote.
Men took for granted all that could be said against intemperance, war and slavery. But no such advantage was found in the beginning of the cause of suffrage for women. On the contrary, everything in her condition was supposed to be lovely, just as it should be. She had no rights denied, no wrongs to redress. She herself had no suspicion but that all was going well with her. She floated along on the tide of life as her mother and grandmother had done before her, as in a dream of Paradise. Her wrongs, if she had any, were too occult to be seen, and too light to be felt. It required a daring voice and a determined hand to awake her from this delightful dream and call the nation to account for the rights and opportunities of which it was depriving her. It was well understood at the beginning that woman would not thank us for disturbing her by this call to duty, and it was known that man would denounce and scorn us for such a daring innovation upon the established order of things. But this did not appall or delay the word and work.
There are few facts in my humble history to which I look back with more satisfaction than to the fact, recorded in the history of the woman-suffrage movement, that I was sufficiently enlightened at that early day, and when only a few years from slavery, to support your resolution for woman suffrage. I have done very little in this world in which to glory except this one act—and I certainly glory in that. When I ran away form slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of woman, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act.
The relation of man to woman has the advantage tell us that what is always was and always will be, world without end. But we have heard this old argument before, and if we live very long we shall hear it again. When any aged error shall be assailed, and any old abuse is to be removed, we shall meet this same old argument. Man has been so long the king and woman the subject—man has been so long accustomed to command and woman to obey—that both parties to the relation have been hardened into their respective places, and thus has been piled up a mountain of iron against woman’s enfranchisement.
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 inscribed upon all the powers and faculties of her soul, and no custom, law or usage can ever destroy it. Now that it has got fairly fixed in the minds of the few, it is bound to become fixed in the minds of the many, and be supported at last by a great cloud of witnesses, which no man can number and no power can withstand.
Lucretia Mott, a name less familiar to us, was an outspoken abolitionist and at the birth of the women's suffrage movement. I loved hearing how, in her upbringing from her birth in the late 1700's, she always sensed her equality with men. She was raised on Nantucket in a Quaker community. The men were fishermen and whalers and the women ran the shops and did the business. She was crushed to discover a major discrepancy in the pay of male and female teachers. It was her first glimpse at the reality of the world in which she lived. I was impressed by her tenacity. She said the nearly all-women delegation who attended a world conference in London on ending slavery was not seated or given the opportunity to speak or vote. She didn't leave, as I would have been tempted to do in my frustration. She said her greatest persecution for fighting for both the rights of enslaved people and the rights of women came from her own Quaker friends. Still she kept her faith.
When these two were asked for advice in our present fights for equality for minorities and women, they had curious advice: from Fredrick Douglass, read and know the constitution; and from Lucretia Mott, have faith in God and seek him for guidance. EV made this comment: when it was asked what they thought about our modern leaders and movements, Black Lives Matter and the Women's March, she noted that they demurred and it seemed to her that these modern causes felt so different from what she was witnessing on the stage and had learned about. The words of these guests shone with truth and justice. Our modern movements seem infused with hate and division. Lucretia Mott even said we seemed to be a society of complainers. And Mr. Douglass urged us to look inside ourselves for what we see is wrong in society.
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| The kids with Nathan Richardson as Fredrick Douglass. |
That was a good call to action. But I had a question for the both of them I wished to ask, and found in the answer a greater call. I was only able to ask the actor who played Douglass, but my question was why, did he suppose, that we do not tell the stories nor celebrate the heroes of the women's suffrage movement as faithfully as we tell the stories and celebrate the heroes of ending slavery. We've seem movies about the civil war. There are story books about escaped slaves - even that we know the name Fredrick Douglass and NOT Lucretia Mott should be telling. He said there was a saying of his people (African Americans?) that until the lion learns to read and write, the hunter will always be the hero, will always tell the story. I don't know that that is WHY these stories don't already exist, but it was a call to begin to tell them.
I am not the ablest person to seek to change the narrative, to seek to help boys and girls know the strength and importance of girls and women, in their sacrifices, in their bravery. But I do have a voice. And I love sharing my own story here. Beyond that, I have prayed that God show me the way, show me the stories, and help me tell them. We'll see where this leads.
(Oh, and I was in interviewed in the Herald Journal. Here are my quotes:
“They had a deep knowledge of the characters, but also the context of the time that they lived in,” said Steffanie Casperson, a local community member who attended the event. Casperson said she brought her children to the program because she had recently taken them to some of the places where Douglass spoke in Boston. She said she was excited for them to learn more about his life and the life of Mott. "I wanted my children to hear that older context, to hear some of the struggle,” Casperson said. “Anything you can do like this where people are live and they are speaking in first person I think is such a deeper, richer experience than reading about it in a book.” Overall, Casperson said the event reminded her of the power she has to make a difference. “Sometimes I have to go, ‘I have a voice.’ And I can speak and advocate for myself. I don’t need the agreement of the men around me,” Casperson said.)
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