Frederick Douglass's Women:
Anna Murray Douglass
Anna Murray, the daughter of Barnbarra and Mary Murray, recently
freed slaves from Denton
in Caroline County, Maryland, might have been born in 1813. As a young adult, she worked as a housekeeper
and laundress for white people in Baltimore,
Maryland. In 1838 she met Frederick Washington Bailey, a ship
caulker six years her junior, “through mutual friends at the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society,
an organization of free blacks who promoted literacy.” Criticized later in
life for being essentially illiterate, her
involvement with the Improvement Society and the fact that Douglass was attracted
to her augurs that “she had had some interest in self-improvement in her youth”
(Fought 1).
Several months later Anna helped Frederick
flee to New York City. Anna
sold many of her belongings to help Frederick
purchase the train tickets for his escape. She also sewed the sailor uniform he
wore as a disguise and accumulated the necessary items for starting a household.
Once Frederick reached his destination in New York City, he wrote
for her to join him. The Reverend James W. C. Pennington performed their
marriage ceremony, and the young couple moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts,
first using the last name of Johnson but soon changing it to Douglass (Fought
1).
Their years living in New Bedford were apparently congenial. Anna gave birth to four children -- Rosetta,
Lewis Henry, Charles Remond, and Frederick Douglass Jr. Frederick
worked manual labor jobs while Anna kept house on a small budget. Later, because Frederick
had become an important member of and speaker for the American Anti-Slavery
Society, he and his family moved to Lynn,
Massachusetts. While he toured nearby
states delivering anti-slavery messages, Anna took in piecework from the local
shoe factories.
Strain began to
manifest in the Douglass marriage …. He spent a good deal of time away from
home giving lectures, including two years in Europe.
Most of his white associates expressed disdain for his wife, at their most
generous referring to Anna as a poor intellectual match for her husband, and
treated her like a servant in her own home.
They … focused on Anna’s
illiteracy and stoicism to bolster their arguments. Anna, however, had little
time for intellectual pursuits while running a household and raising a family
with little help from her husband (Fought 1).
She did take an active role in the Boston
Female Anti-Slavery Society, however, “and later prevailed upon her husband to
train their sons as typesetters for his abolitionist newspaper, the North Star” (Kentake 1).
By the late 1840s Anna had lost much of her emotional
support. Rosetta was away at school in Albany, New York.
Her friend and household helper, Harriet
Bailey, had married and moved to Springfield,
Massachusetts. Rumors reached
Anna that Frederick, touring England, was
receiving lavish attention from female supporters. When he returned to America in 1847, Douglass moved the family to Rochester, New York, taking
Anna away from the small, active Lynn
black community of which she had been a part.
“Shortly thereafter she suffered the
indignity of having the British reformer Julia Griffiths move into the Douglass
home, which caused a storm of controversy alleging Frederick’s
infidelity with Griffiths.
The departure of Griffiths
was followed by the arrival of Ottila Assing, who installed herself in the
Douglass home for several months out of the year over the next twenty years.” During these years Anna was forced to host “a
string of white abolitionists who could barely conceal their disdain for her.
Only the extended stays of Rosetta and her children and the companionship of
Louisa Sprague, Rosetta’s sister-in-law who lived in the Douglass home as a
housekeeper, relieved Anna’s loneliness” (Fought 2).
Anna did understand her husband’s role in fighting
slavery and her role as helpmate. She
took pride in her husband’s appearance and accomplishments and in keeping a
well-ordered home. She continued to take an active part in operation of the household,
even after Douglass had become wealthy enough to hire servants (Fought 2).
After the
family moved to Rochester, New York, Anna established the Douglass home as a
station on the Underground Railroad, providing food, board and clean linen for
hundreds of fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. Her daughter Rosetta later
wrote that it was not unusual for her mother to be called up at all hours of
the night to prepare supper for a "hungry lot of fleeing humanity" (MacLean 1).
Douglass did appreciate the role that Anna played in his
life. During his first visit to England he
maintained a cordial distance from his enthusiastic female admirers, and he
defended his wife when anyone suggested that she was not a fit mate for him.
After his return home in 1847 Anna conceived their last child, Annie, and
Douglass risked his own arrest to reenter the United States to comfort Anna in
the wake of that child’s death ten years later.(Fought 2)
Anna suffered from various ailments – particularly
headaches that made her ill -- for much of her life. In her later years she
suffered from a stroke that confined her to a wheelchair and her bedroom. In
August 1882 she died hours after suffering a second stroke. Frederick
fell into a lengthy depression that he described the
darkest moment of his life.
Anna’s daughter Rosetta’s memoir – My Mother as I
Recall Her – places Anna squarely within the nineteenth-century “cult
of domesticity.” Rosetta used Anna as a symbol of the equality of black women
within that sphere during an era in which black women were portrayed as either
the sexually promiscuous “Jezebel” or the maternal caretaker “Mammy” of white
families. On the other hand, not only did Anna actively support the end of
slavery by aiding her husband’s flight to freedom and allowing him to pursue
antislavery work but also she maintained an impeccable home and preserved her
own dignity and that of her marriage in the face of white assault. In Rosetta’s
narrative Anna emerges as a model of middle-class womanhood (Fought 3).
Rosetta observed: Her courage, her sympathy at the start was the main-spring that
supported the career of Frederick Douglass. As is the condition of most wives
her identity became merged into that of her husband. Thus only the few of their
friends in the North really knew and appreciated the full value of the woman
who presided over the Douglass home for forty-four years (MacLean 4).
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