Anna murray douglass biography books

As the wife of one of the most important men of the nineteenth century, Anna Douglass could not and cannot escape notice for her part in American history. After all, during the forty-four years of their marriage Frederick Douglass lived an extraordinary life, and so did Anna.

Learn about Anna Murray Douglass, wife of Frederick Douglass, and her vital role in history, including the Underground Railroad and supporting her husband’s public life.

Yet she had to do so largely in response to his decisions, while also navigating complicated demands upon herself as a working-class Black woman in an upwardly mobile family, as a woman raising five children with a largely absent husband, as a woman subjected to constant public and judgmental scrutiny, and as a woman tasked with much of the unseen labor of fighting racism , sometimes in conflict with her own husband.

The Association portrayed their father as a singular Great Man within an integrated antislavery and Black civil rights movement, but the Douglass children emphasized the centrality of their Black family in supporting his work. That a man like Frederick Douglass would not only find something attractive in Anna Murray in the first place, but continue to share a life with her for over four decades, especially without committing adultery, seemed to mystify many.

Even gestures to sympathize with Anna, such as imagining her as a member of the all-male East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society or that she read sheet music and played the violin, all in the absence of evidence, carried the implicit expectation that Douglass should have a different sort of wife. Trying to find Anna Murray, the woman who became Mrs.

Frederick Douglass, within this morass of interpretation and her own rejection of attention is a nearly impossible task. Still, while she did not leave her own account of her life, she did impress herself on the historical record.

Anna Murray Douglass ( – August 4, ) was an American abolitionist, member of the Underground Railroad, and the first wife of American social reformer and statesman Frederick Douglass, from to her death.

Even if her actions do not reveal her motivations, they took place within a context and served a function in the life of her family that suggests she was far more than the long-suffering woman-behind-the-man than even her children described. For instance, two of the most noted elements of her life are that she was born free and that she took care of people fleeing on the Underground Railroad.

The first as-yet known record of her appears on May 29, , when she and several of her family members, possibly siblings, applied for Certificates of Freedom that would allow them to travel out of Maryland unmolested. Six years later, she helped Frederick Bailey to escape, married him, and together with her husband took the last name Douglass.

Between and , she welcomed into her house Harriet Bailey also known as Ruth Cox , a young woman who had also fled slavery. In other words, Anna had lived a life in which freedom was precarious and in which defiance of the law was a matter embedded in daily life. Likewise, contemporary accounts of Anna Douglass consistently associated her with her home.

While women abolitionists had politicized the home through their antislavery meetings, Anna seems not to have participated in any formal reform organization after