Women in Douglass Still Bound

Women in Douglass

Still Bound to Notions of the Separate Spheres and Roles of Men and Women: Frederick Douglass My Life in Bondage

One might like to think of Frederick Douglass as a purely radical thinker, a man on the cutting edge of female rights as well as Black liberation. But in his autobiography, Douglass was more apt to confirm common notions of acceptable feminine behavior and feminine nature than to subvert such notions. He does make it clear that the American institution of slavery had a uniquely deleterious effect upon the hearts, minds and souls of American womanhood. When this was suggested Frederick Douglass in his seminal anti-slavery autobiography entitled My Life in Bondage, he spoke to an America so hardened to slavery that even Abraham Lincoln, who was to become the great liberator in the eyes of many, assured the South in his first Inaugural Address that he was no abolitionist. But one of the anti-slavery arguments that Douglass makes, over and over again over the course of his work is that slavery is particularly bad because it destroys the 'natural' gentleness of women. Thus Douglass may have been a radical abolitionist, but he was not a radical advocate of different ways of conceptualizing women in literature.

Over the course of his work, Douglass suggested that slavery caused White women to become cruel and immoral, caused Black slave woman to have their hearts ripped out, upon seeing their children torn from their bosoms, and finally sundered the traditional love relationship between husband and wife, a union which should have been permanent but became impermanent because of slavery. The notion of female morality was quite important to Douglass' likely White audiences, and even Northerners such as "Amelia, a Lowell Factory Worker, on Wage Slavery" in a Northern expose of the Lowell mills made use of similar metaphors of wage labor's effects upon the uniquely tender hearts and bodies of women. Thus, this was an argument with apparently great appeal to concerned Northern listeners, Douglass' likely intended audience. Hence, the author's stress upon how slavery negatively affected Christian female Whites and his stress upon how the soft, natural goodness of Black maternal womanhood was injured through continuing the institution of slavery in the American South.

The unique pains of slavery exerted upon the hearts of women can be seen when Douglass mourns. "My poor mother, like many other slave-women, had many children, but NO FAMILY! The domestic hearth, with its holy lessons and precious endearments, is abolished in the case of a slave-mother and her children. 'Little children, love one another,' are words seldom heard in a slave cabin." (Douglass, 48) This perversion of the normal ties between mother and child, which would have presumably tugged at the heartstrings of listeners who assumed that every woman, slave or free, naturally wanted to be nothing but a docile mother is somewhat unintentionally undercut by the decidedly unfeminine determination shown by Douglass' mother. As a "field hand, she seldom had leisure, by day, for the performance of the journey," to see Douglass at night. (Douglass 54)

But Douglass hastens to make clear that although his mother was walking alone at night, she only did so because she striving to see her child even though walking alone required a tremendous amount of daring upon the woman's part, and "It was a greater luxury than slavery could afford, to allow a black slave-mother a horse or a mule, upon which to travel twenty-four miles, when she could walk the distance." (Douglass 58) Although Douglass does not 'spell out' the risk, his implication is that a woman wandering unattended and alone can easily be raped. Again, rather than subverting conventional expectations about the strength of women even when in bondage, her willingness to risk all, despite feminine weakness, and the refusal of her master to extend masculine chivalry in the form of protection or even a horse to a woman alone is seen as an extension of the crime of slavery itself.

The refusal of the owner of this woman to extend consideration to her sentiments as a mother is another proof of the vile nature of the institution, for "besides, it is deemed a foolish whim for a slave-mother to manifest concern to see her children, and, in one point-of-view, the case is made out -- she can do nothing for them. She has no control over them; the master is even more than the mother, in all matters touching the fate of her child. Why, then, should she give herself any concern? She has no responsibility. Such is the reasoning, and such the practice. The iron rule of the plantation, always passionately and violently enforced in that neighborhood, makes flogging the penalty of failing to be in the field before sunrise in the morning, unless special permission be given to the absenting slave. 'I went to see my child,' is no excuse to the ear or heart of the overseer." (Douglass 58) The perversion of the bonds of family via slavery is echoed as well in Lincoln's later Gettysburg address. The President discusses how brother fights brother in a nation divided. But the divisions of mother and son in Douglass, because the divisions enacted by slavery are against the natural desires of women to care for their children, are seen as particularly poignant and are explicitly rooted in expected gender norms.

Douglass makes it quite clear that a mother and a son have a special bond that no laws of slavery can sunder for, "just as I began to help myself to my very dry meal, in came my dear mother. And now, dear reader, a scene occurred which was altogether worth beholding, and to me it was instructive as well as interesting. The friendless and hungry boy, in his extremest need -- and when he did not dare to look for succor -- found himself in the strong, protecting arms of a mother; a mother who was, at the moment (being endowed with high powers of manner as well as matter) more than a match for all his enemies. I shall never forget the indescribable expression of her countenance, when I told her that I had had no food since morning; and that Aunt Katy said she 'meant to starve the life out of me.'" (Douglass 58) Mother provides food and nourishment, love and understanding -- a mother and son are all, so long as they are together, writes Douglass.

That night I learned the fact, that I was, not only a child, but somebody's child." Douglass' sense of belonging is not merely a son's love -- he belongs by nature to his mother's nourishing breast, not to an owner, he suggests. (Douglass 58) Even when away from his mother, however, some women do show him kindness, such as Miss Lucretia who "had bestowed upon me such words and looks as taught me that she pitied me," even though "she did not love me," like the boy's lost mother. Like his mother, Miss Lucretia feeds the boy, for "in addition to words and looks, she sometimes gave me a piece of bread and butter; a thing not set down in the bill of fare, and which must have been an extra ration, planned aside from either Aunt Katy or old master, solely out of the tender regard and friendship she had for me." Miss Sophia, who reads the bible to Douglass and satisfies his hunger for learning, later shows this kindness. (Douglass 146-149)