Page "Frederick Douglass" Paragraph 64

In 1884, Douglass married again, to Helen Pitts, a white feminist from Honeoye, New York.

Pitts was the daughter of Gideon Pitts, Jr., an abolitionist colleague and friend of Douglass.

A graduate of Mount Holyoke College ( then called Mount Holyoke Female Seminary ), she worked on a radical feminist publication named Alpha while living in Washington, D. C.

The couple faced a storm of controversy with their marriage, since Pitts was both white and nearly 20 years younger than Douglass.

Her family stopped speaking to her ; his family connection was bruised, as his children felt his marriage was a repudiation of their mother.

But feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton congratulated the couple.

Douglass responded to the criticisms by saying that his first marriage had been to someone the color of his mother, and his second to someone the color of his father.

The new couple traveled to England, France, Italy, Egypt and Greece from 1886 to 1887.