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The women's rights movement in America was directly influenced by the work of the abolitionist
movement. Nearly all women's rights advocates supported abolition, however not all abolitionists
supported a woman's right to engage herself in political activity. Responding to the attempted
silencing of women at antislavery conventions, and the expectation that they stay at home
caring for their children, women's rights advocates like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Lucrecia Mott organized the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, NY in 1848,
and asked American women to consider whether they too felt in some sense enslaved.
***
By 1863, the abolitionist and women's rights advocate Sojourner Truth had spent more than
twenty years speaking out against slavery, and her health had seriously declined. At
the time President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, she was living in a basement
in Battle Creek, Michigan. But news of the Proclamation seemed to rejuvenate her health,
and she mustered her strength to continue her campaign for justice. "I mean to live
till I am a hundred years old, if it please God, and see my people all free." (308)
Born Isabella Bomefree in Ulster County, New York in 1797, as a Dutch-speaking slave, she
labored for four masters; in 1827, Isabella took flight after her final master reneged
on a promise to grant her the freedom she had toiled for. She migrated to New York City
in 1828, a year after the state completed the official emancipation of its slaves. In
the city, she worked as a housekeeper, joined reform movements, and associated with an ill-fated
Millennialist spiritual community. Referring to the crowded city as "a second ***," she
left New York City in 1843. Upon her departure, she informed her landlady "that her name was
no longer Isabella, but SOJOURNER," and that she felt the calling to become an itinerant
preacher. She was 46 years old, and had never had a permanent home, so the new name became
permanent. As her Narrative explains: "She was now fairly started on her pilgrimage;
her bundle in one hand, and a little basket of provisions in the other, and two York shillings
in her purse—her heart strong in the faith that her true work lay before her, and that
the Lord was her director."
Making her way across Long Island and up the Connecticut River Valley, through to Northampton,
Massachusetts, she began giving innumerable speeches against slavery and on behalf of
women's rights, and kept audiences transfixed. She stood five feet eleven inches, spoke in
a low voice, and sang with breathtaking beauty. One friend in her Narrative reported that
Truth's "commanding figure and dignified manner hushed every trifler into silence, and her
singular and sometimes uncouth modes of expression never provoked a laugh, but often were the
whole audience melted into tears by her touching stories." Truth's accomplishments were doubly
significant because she was not able to read or write. Her considerable fame rested almost
entirely on her speeches, her preaching, and her singing. But in 1846, she began dictating
her story to Olive Gilbert, a white abolitionist friend, in hopes of matching the success of
Frederick Douglass's narrative of enslavement and emancipation. The publishing of The Narrative
of Sojourner Truth in 1850 helped publicize her story, and enabled her to pay the mortgage
on her house in Massachusetts.
By 1863, she had resettled in Battle Creek, and beginning that fall, after regaining her
health, she spent a great deal of time in Detroit on behalf of the war effort, and served
as Battle Creek's representative at the Michigan Ladies Freedmen's Aid Society. Months after
the Detroit Race Riot of March 1863, Truth lectured on prejudice to Methodist children
at the State Sabbath School convention in Battle Creek. "Children," she said, "Who made
your skin white? Was it God? Who made mine Black? Was it not the same God? Thus get rid
of your prejudice and learn to love colored children that you may all be children of your
father in Heaven."
In May 1863, feminist activist Frances Dana Barker Gage published a revised version of
Truth's "Ain't I A Woman?" speech, originally delivered in Akron, Ohio in 1851. Gage's version
of the speech gained widespread popularity, and became the version used in history books.
Truth's most famous speech lives on as a powerful declaration of female independence:
"That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over
ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over
mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm!
I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And
ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it
- and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and
seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but
Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?"
Despite her staunch support for the women's rights movement, Sojourner Truth eventually
broke with movement pioneers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony when Stanton
stated she would not support the fight for black voting rights if women were still denied
the right. The article that made Sojourner Truth most famous was published by Harriet
Beecher Stowe, the famous author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, in the Atlantic Monthly in 1863.
Stowe dubbed Sojourner Truth "The Libyan Sibyl," and made her a national icon of the abolitionist
movement. But the article was largely a fiction, one that distorted its subject into a gullible
and slightly foolish stereotype who spoke in a crude and almost incomprehensible dialect,
and overemphasized the naïve aspects of her Pentecostal religious faith (Washington 301).
"Mrs. Stowe laid it on thick," said Sojourner Truth (Washington 302), who refused throughout
her life to allow the article to be read to her.
Even if Stowe painted a romanticized portrait of her subject, she was right to understand
religious faith as the cornerstone of Sojourner Truth's appeal. As historian Nell Irvin Painter
explains: "Her ability to call upon a supernatural power gave her a resource claimed by millions
of black women and by disempowered people the world over. Without doubt, it was Truth's
religious faith that transformed her from Isabella, domestic servant, into Sojourner
Truth, a hero for three centuries at least" (Painter 4). Truth died at her home in Battle
Creek in 1883, after spending years in a hard-fought attempt to convince the federal government
to provide former slaves with land in the West. Though this particular campaign earned
only limited success, Truth's battles against various inequalities made her one of the most
important women of the 19th century.
Truth was a keen and modest judge of her own accomplishments: "I have plead with all the
force I had that the day might come that the colored people might own their own soul and
body. Well the day has come, although it came through blood. It makes no difference how
it came—it did come" (Washington 298). Sojourner Truth was a remarkable case, but the Civil
War saw many female heroes. During the war, American women threw themselves into public
life with an enthusiasm born out of a sense of duty. Nearly 20,000 women worked directly
for the Union war effort, and more than 400 women disguised themselves as men in order
to fight for the Union and Confederate armies. Through various activities, these pioneers
dislodged the idea that women were simply expected to provide a clean home and nurturing
environment for husbands and children. By joining volunteer brigades, working as nurses,
and campaigning against social inequalities, American women were able to expand the prospects
of female self-determination.
Works Cited and Further Reading
The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave. Boston: 1850.
Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol. New York: Norton, 1997.
Washington, Margaret. Sojourner Truth's America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.