3 - “There Are Two Great Oceans”: The Slavery Metaphor in the Antebellum Women's Rights Discourse as Redescription of Race and Gender

Summary

The anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association of May 12 and 13, 1869, was a watershed for American reformers. During the meeting, abolitionists and women's rights activists severed personal ties already weakened by the debate over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and divided into opposing camps. How did people who had been working side by side for several decades find themselves in the situation of choosing between the two causes—the rights of African Americans and those of women—they had previously fought for almost indiscriminately? Trying to make sense of this rift, women's rights activist Lucy Stone opted for metaphorical language: “Woman has an ocean of wrongs too deep for any plummet, and the negro, too, has an ocean of wrongs that cannot be fathomed. There are two great oceans; in the one is the black man, and in the other is the woman,” she said. The image of the ocean, used for both “woman” and “the negro,” was meant to show that both groups suffered equally from oppression, but it also insisted on the unfathomable depth of their subordination, and the impossibility for any outsider to truly understand it.

Stone's ocean analogy answered Frederick Douglass's speech, made at the same meeting, in favor of the immediate enfranchisement of black men. Despite her lukewarm support for the Fifteenth Amendment—“I will be thankful in my soul if any body can get out of the terrible pit,” she conceded—she disagreed with the idea brought forward by Douglass that black men were more in need of protection than women: “I want to remind the audience that when he [Douglass] says what the Ku-Kluxes did all over the South, the Ku-Kluxes here in the North in the shape of men, take away the children from the mother, and separate them as completely as if done on the block of the auctioneer.”