Philip Sheldon Foner – författare

In their long, continuing struggle for equality, American women have had to rely primarily on their own resources, which have been considerable. Yet many men have helped advance their cause. Perhaps foremost among them was the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass. According to the women of the time, Douglass was their preeminent male supporter. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, "He was the only man I ever saw who understood the degradation of the disfranchisement of women." This book collects the speeches and writings of Frederick Douglass on women's rights. Since suffrage was the major concern of the movement, the issue of voting was primary among Douglass's themes however, he also spoke and wrote resolutely on the need for women to reach their full potential by participating in every phase of American society and in every aspect of decision-making. No one was more insistent that the oppression of women violated the principles proclaimed at the birth of the American Republic. He was, in short, in favour of "absolute justice and perfect equality" for women. And because of his pride in his own race, he never failed to remind the white women who led the movement that black women endured an even greater oppression in white, male-dominated society than they did. Always eloquent and rarely less than inspiring, Frederick Douglass on Women's Rights presents the words of one of America's greatest spokesmen on one of the most important issues of the nineteenth century, words which still ring with truth and power today.

Using documents drawn from newspapers, magazines, and books, this volume provides a documentary history of the relationships between labor and abolitionists from the early 1830s to the Civil War. It includes newspaper articles from mainstream dailies as well as from abolitionist journals and the labor press. The voices heard from include prominent abolitionist leaders, grass roots activists, representatives of the labor movement, land reformers, and utopian advocates of universal reform. The book shows labor's response to such critical episodes as the 1831 Nat Turner Revolt, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, John Brown's execution, and the election of Abraham Lincoln.Themes covered include the contrast between wage labor and chattel slavery, the abolitionists' outreach to white labor, the views of reformers who held that a universal solution to the labor question took priority over abolition, the varying responses of labor activists to the slavery question, and labor's growing role in the 1850s as a constituent in an antislavery coalition. At the same time, the book notes the continued presence of racism and specific instances of friction between white and black workers, as in the explosive violence of the 1863 New York City Draft Riot.