Chapter 25 - Family

Summary

Often relegated to a parallel narrative in Frederick Douglass’s biography, family life played an integral role in his political life. He and his first wife, Anna Murray, formed a partnership defying their upbringing as a slave and as a free woman surrounded by slavery. They implicitly claimed citizenship by demanding the integrity and privacy of their free family, contradicting depictions of African Americans in popular culture and contemporary race science. By doing so, they politicized their household as much as when they provided a haven for militants, the self-emancipated, or extended kin in need. Anna and their daughter, Rosetta, navigated roles of domesticity and activism by serving the movement through support of Douglass, but Rosetta especially endured the conflicts between the patriarchal family and women’s rights ideology endorsed by her father. In his widowhood, Douglass further challenged racial definitions of family by marrying a white woman, Helen Pitts.