History Has It: An Extraordinary Union
A new occasional series, highlighting fascinating people and facts related to MHC.
Rarely do passion and service play themselves out in so gripping a manner as in the life of Helen Pitts Douglass, class of 1859. An educated woman whose sense of justice led her to take action in both the women’s and civil rights movements, Douglass is perhaps best remembered as the second wife of Frederick Douglass, the eloquent black orator, author, and spokesman for the abolition of slavery.
Following graduation from Mount Holyoke, Helen— who was white—taught freed slaves for two years and then, after many years of poor health, moved to Washington, D.C., to coedit The Alpha, a feminist publication. In 1882, she was hired as a clerk for Frederick Douglass in the office of the Recorder of Deeds, and following the death of his first wife, Anna, married Douglass in 1884.
Helen’s parents were abolitionists and old friends with Douglass but they nevertheless disowned her for entering into an interracial marriage. Another heartbreaking twist was the subsequent suicide of Ottilie Assing, a German journalist whose twenty-eight year professional—and most likely intimate—collaboration with Douglass was abruptly severed following his marriage to Helen.
But the Douglasses’ eleven-year union was by all accounts a happy one, and Helen wrote of her husband, “The more I know of Mr. Douglass, the more I wonder at the beauty and greatness of his character.” When Douglass died in 1895, Helen went on to distinguish herself as public speaker on civil and women’s rights. She died in 1903.—M.H.B
Photo: undated, National Park Service
