Theft Is Property! (Radical Américas) by Robert Nichols

Author:Robert Nichols [Nichols, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781478006732
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2019-12-20T08:00:00+00:00

II

On May 24, 1886, the famed, formerly enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave a speech to the Annual Meeting of the New England Woman Suffrage Association in Boston. Extolling the virtues of the suffragette movement and defending their methods of vigorous “agitation,” Douglass sought to draw parallels between his own experience as an enslaved man and the plight of his (predominantly, if not exclusively, white) female audience. The core connection between these two otherwise distinct struggles was, he argued, the idea of self-ownership. His argument consisted, first, in positing that the Civil War was best framed as a struggle “over the question whether a man is the rightful owner of his own body.” Second, Douglass asserted that the basic assertion of self-ownership originally made visible in the context of slavery provided a “whole encyclopedia of argument,” which equally applied to the case of suffrage.23 In spirals of rhetorical heightening, Douglass linked these disparate movements.

The great fact underlying the claim for universal suffrage is that every man is himself and belongs to himself, and represents his own individuality, not only in form and feature but in thought and feeling. And the same is true of woman. She is herself, and can be nobody else than herself. Her selfhood is as perfect as perfect and as absolute as is the selfhood of man. She can no more part with her personality than she can part with her shadow. This fundamental, unchangeable, and everlasting condition or law of nature is, to some extent, recognized both by the government of the state and of the nation.24

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.