[In the following essay, Painter presents a brief history of Sojourner Truth's life and also examines her place in cultural history.]

The issue of race is always present in American culture, especially in large areas such as women's rights. Understandably, Americans often try to avoid the issue, for race can still sabotage analysis of terms as essential as the nineteenth-century formulation of woman. When race is acknowledged in discussions of American culture, the significance of the whole and the parts alters, subtly or drastically. Words and phrases acquire additional connotations, and lines of reasoning may twist imperceptibly. Large parts of social equations may disappear, as other parts are enhanced. Often the undeniable importance of race makes it too facile an explanation; it seems to provide answers that are too easy to hard questions.

In American antislavery feminism few of the principals who have been remembered were of African descent, but the movement was tethered both to the racially charged institution of slavery and to notions of gender that are deeply but subtly influenced by race. If the need for a black presence was felt in the early histories of American feminism, merely quoting the speeches of Sojourner Truth, an unforgettable black woman who frequented the halls where women organized for the abolition of slavery and the achievements of their own rights, apparently filled that need. With the flowering of black women's studies, however, merely quoting Sojourner Truth no longer substitutes for carefully analyzing Truth's persona and her place in the history of American reform.

A former slave from the Hudson River valley in New York, Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797-1883) appeared often on the antislavery and women's rights lecture circuits in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s. She is still one of the two most famous nineteenth-century black women; the other, Harriet Tubman, was also a mature, dark-skinned, unlettered former slave. Since Truth's heyday as an abolitionist and women's rights advocate, she has symbolized the connection of sex and race in liberal reform. The line most closely associated with her persona—“and ar'n't I a woman?”—demands that the category of “woman” include those who are poor or not white.

This message bears repeating on a regular basis, particularly as feminists seek to make their movement more broadly representative. The very fact that Truth's message has remained pertinent for so long inspires investigation into her place in feminist abolitionism and the function of her public persona in the history of American reform. The women's rights conference in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, at which Truth gave her most famous speech and at which she first gained prominence as a feminist, will serve here as the touchstone of my analysis.

As attractive as the scene in Akron has become to modern readers, its meaning is no longer as straightforward as it had seemed. Reexamining the meeting at Akron and Truth's own personal history in light of recent scholarship on feminist abolitionists raises new questions about the use of a naive persona among Americans who are educated, particularly when the naif is black and the educated are white. Was Sojourner Truth unique in 1851? What made her remarkable and how intentionally created was her persona? Why is Truth remembered while other black women reformers have mostly been forgotten? Could nineteenth-century black women feminist abolitionists be “woman”?

Comparing Truth with antislavery female leadership and the rank and file, I reconsider the prophetic persona of Sojourner Truth—a persona that Truth herself invented and that educated white women helped elaborate and preserve in American memory. I employ two different strategies. First I present a narrative history of Sojourner Truth; because Truth's life is less well known than her persona, this section runs long. In the second part of my essay, I analyze the discursive approaches that preserved Truth's place in cultural history.

Even though black women had already been active in women's reform for decades, the Ohio women's rights convention held in Akron in May 1851 is primarily remembered today, as in the nineteenth century, as the occasion when Sojourner Truth inserted black women into women's reform and reclaimed physical and emotional strength for all women. As was often the case, Truth was the only black person present. This was an event of enormous rhetorical and symbolic, as well as historical, importance. Not surprisingly, therefore, the only report that has been widely reprinted features Truth prominently. Its author was Frances Dana Gage, a white antislavery writer and lecturer from McConnelsville, Ohio, who chaired the meeting.¹

By Gage's account, Truth stood out immediately. “A tall, gaunt, black women in a gray dress and white turban, surmounted with an uncouth sunbonnet,” Truth made an unusual entrance and took an unorthodox seat. She “march[ed] deliberately into the church, walk[ed] with the air of a queen up the aisle, and [sat] upon the pulpit steps.” During the first day, Gage writes, Truth said nothing. On the second day, several ministers in the audience vehemently denied women's claim to equal rights, arguing that women lacked intelligence, that Jesus Christ was a man, and that Eve, who had tempted man into original sin, was a woman. Throughout this onslaught, Gage reported, none of the white women in the convention was brave enough to counter the charges. As respectable white women cowered, silenced by the Pauline prohibition against women's public speech, scoffers and small boys in the gallery enjoyed the women's chagrin.

Then, said Gage, Sojourner Truth acted: “This almost Amazon form, which stood nearly six feet high, head erect, and eye piercing the upper air” instantly riveted everyone's attention. Whereas the white women organizers of the meeting failed to respond to the ministers' denunciation of women's rights, Truth, an uninvited participant, spoke for all the women in phrases that effectively silenced the male opposition. Gage recalled Truth's words:

Wall, chilern, whar dar is so much racket dar must be somethin' out o' kilter. I tink dat 'twixt de niggers of the Souf and de womin at de Norf, all talkin' 'bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all dis here talkin' 'bout?

Dat man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to hab de best place everywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gibs me any best place! And ar'n't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! (and she bared her right arm to the shoulder, showing her tremendous muscular power). I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ar'n't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear de lash as well! And ar'n't I a woman? I have borne thirteen chilern, and seen 'em mos' all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ar'n't I a woman?

Subduing what Gage terms the “mobbish spirit of the day,” Truth reversed this tide of denigration. Her speech brought “roars of applause” and turned a rout into triumph.²

Modern readers generally focus on one aspect of this report, Sojourner Truth's demand that poor, black women like herself be included with people classed as women. Some women are workers, Truth says, making the ability to work a womanly characteristic. Truth reminds her audience that although women belong to different classes and races, they nonetheless remain women, no matter what their material condition.

But Gage has still more to say about Sojourner Truth in this setting. Composing the rhetorical formula that made Truth's theme so memorable, Gage also delivers an important message about Truth's relative efficacy. Gage underscores Truth's authority by contrasting the timidity of the white women who had organized the meeting with the fearless Sojourner Truth. Summing up the symbolic significance of the scene, critic Jean Fagan Yellin says that Gage paints the black woman as the “powerful rescuer” of the powerless white women.³

The seat that Truth assumed—on the steps of the pulpit rather than in the pews—manifests the degree to which she stood (or rather sat) apart from the rest of the gathering. This physical placement hints at a distinction separating Truth from her feminist abolitionist peers that exceeds racial difference. Truth not only looked different from the white women, she appeared stronger as well. In the midst of the long quotation in dialect, Gage interrupts Truth's exotic phrasing to insert her own stage business in standard English, again contrasting two modes of expression and being. Gage does not explain how Truth came to exercise such power, leaving the curious reader to search out her own explanations. Truth's prior experience would seem a likely place to start, for compared with other women in the church that day she apparently traveled a singular life's road to Akron.

Sojourner Truth was born Isabella, in Hurley, Ulster County, New York, a region dominated culturally and economically by the descendants of nineteenth-century Dutch and French Huguenot settlers. Her parents, although not of African birth, seem to have been of unmixed African descent. The family's first language was Dutch. Isabella's earliest religious instruction came from her mother, who taught her to distinguish right from wrong and to believe in the existence of God (“a great man” who lived “high in the sky” and who could see everything that happened on the earth). As a young woman Isabella made a sanctuary on an island in the middle of a stream, where she went to talk with God and repeat the Lord's Prayer, which her mother had taught her.⁴

Separated from her parents as a child, Isabella worked for several owners before gaining her freedom under New York state law in 1827. While still enslaved, she married a fellow bondsman named Thomas, with whom she had five children. Her last year in servitude was charged with emotional events and spiritual development. Her son Peter was sold South illegally, and Isabella took the extraordinary step of going to court to sue successfully for his return. At about this same time, Jesus appeared to her in a vision, and Isabella experienced a conversion. As related in the Narrative of Sojourner Truth: “Her heart was now full of joy and gladness, as it had been of terror, and at one time of despair. In the light of her great happiness, the world was clad in new beauty, the very air sparkled as with diamonds, and was redolent of heaven.”⁵ Although this language recalls that of the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, in his Aldersgate experience, Truth was not connected to any church until 1827, when she began attending a Methodist church in Kingston, Ulster County. There she met a teacher, a Miss Grear, with whom she journeyed to New York City in about 1829. Isabella took her son Peter with her but left her daughters and husband in Ulster County.

In New York City, Isabella attended two Methodist churches, the white John Street Church and the black Zion African Church, formed in the 1790s by black members of John Street Church who had experienced racial discrimination. She also attended camp meetings, at which she preached and effected many conversions. Isabella's ability as a preacher earned her great respect in various Methodist circles, including that of a dissident Methodist merchant, James Latourette. Considering Truth's later history, the Latourette connection is worth noting. Latourette, who had left the Methodist Church in the mid-1820s, wanted to take it back to its uncorrupted roots, and he opposed both the consumption of alcoholic beverages and the institution of slavery. Latourette's disciples became itinerant preachers who were not connected with any formal church.⁶ By the early 1830s, at least, Isabella was associated with several brands of unconventional and revivalist religion.

At the behest of Mrs. Latourette, Isabella attended prayers at the Magdalen Asylum, a controversial mission for prostitutes, one of whose founders was Arthur Tappan, who later became a prominent abolitionist. At the Magdalen Asylum Isabella met and soon joined the household employ of Elijah Pierson, a wealthy widower subject to religious enthusiasms. While working at Pierson's house and participating in Pierson's own brand of religious exercises, Isabella encountered Robert Matthews, an itinerant preacher from upstate New York who further influenced her spiritual evolution. Matthews, born about 1788, was of Scottish descent. Originally a Washington County Presbyterian, he had joined the Dutch Reformed Church in Albany and like many New Yorkers had been powerfully affected by Charles Grandison Finney, the foremost preacher of the Second Great Awakening. Matthews did not become a follower of Finney, but Finney's preaching made him feel that his religion was hollow and encouraged him to redirect his thinking. Matthews was already known for his street-corner exhortations when he had a millenarian revelation one morning in Albany in 1830. As he was shaving, he discovered his great truth: no man who shaved could be a true Christian. He let his beard grow, proclaimed himself a Jew, took the name Matthias, and began to prophesy God's destruction of the city of Albany. Matthias left his family and traveled to Rochester and through Pennsylvania. In 1832 he reached New York City.

In New York, Matthias visited Pierson's home, where he met Isabella. Isabella, as much as Pierson, recognized Matthias's prophetic gift and became his follower. After Pierson and Matthias discovered that they had had matching visions, Matthias renamed Pierson “Elias the Tishbite,” and Pierson and another wealthy merchant underwrote the formation of a commune led by Matthias. Isabella belonged to this “kingdom,” which was housed first in New York City, then in the Hudson River town of Mount Pleasant (now Ossining).⁷

Matthias's kingdom was organized along authoritarian lines, with the prophet retaining the power to make all important and many trivial decisions. He also dictated its theology, which was rather informal and had much in common with other new religions emerging in upstate New York at the time, such as Mormonism and Millerite Second Adventism. Matthias taught his followers—all of whom, except for Isabella and a white woman who shared the housework of the establishment, were middle-class and relatively well educated—that he possessed the spirit of God, that there were good and evil spirits, and that the millennium was imminent. The almost corporeal existence of spirits was also a central tenet of the kingdom. Matthias and his followers did not believe in doctors, reasoning that illness was caused by evil spirits that must be cast out. Members of the kingdom fasted often and followed a diet that emphasized fresh fruit and vegetables and prohibited alcohol.⁸

Like many of the religious cults and utopian communities of the 1830s and 1840s, Matthias's kingdom foundered on the confusion between spiritual and carnal passion. After Pierson's death under suspicious circumstances, Matthias was tried and acquitted of Pierson's murder. The kingdom dissolved, and Matthias moved west. Isabella, his supporter throughout, remained in New York City for nearly a decade longer, taking in washing and doing household work as she had since her arrival in the city.

According to her Narrative, Isabella became exasperated with her life in New York City in 1843, particularly with the money grubbing and suffering that followed the severe economic panic of 1837. As the depression deepened and competition among the destitute grew more stark, Isabella, a poor woman herself, was appalled by her own lack of charity toward those more in need. Then God spoke to her, commanding her to quit the city and take a new name. On June 1, 1843, she renamed herself Sojourner Truth, left New York, and set out, as God instructed her, toward Brooklyn and eastern Long Island.

It is no accident that Truth took to the roads to preach in the year 1843. That year marked the apogee of Millerism, a mass movement in the Northeast that prophesied the arrival of the second Advent of Christ in mid-1843 (later readjusted to sometime between June 1843 and June 1844). William Miller was a farmer from Vermont and northern New York whose evolution closely paralleled (and perhaps inspired) that of his neighbor, Robert Matthews. Aroused by one of Finney's revivals, Miller had begun in 1831 to preach that the world would end in 1843. His message reached hundreds of thousands of people from Maine to Michigan in a series of widely distributed periodicals and through the teachings of scores of itinerant preachers who held forth at frequent and massive camp meetings. In 1843 northerners were particularly receptive to unlettered, itinerant preachers of many sorts, and hundreds of the faithful heeded God's command to preach their message to others. Isabella chose her new name well, for “sojourner” means itinerant, and telling the truth, she said, was her mission.

Once launched, Truth was able to reach large audiences immediately, for excited Millerites staged a series of camp meetings and invited her to preach. Millerites were used to listening to itinerant preachers, including women, so Truth found a ready welcome when she spoke up at those outdoor meetings. As in the early 1830s when she was preaching in and around New York City, Truth acquired a reputation as a gifted preacher and singer. Her audiences were not necessarily all convinced Second Adventists, for all denominations of northern evangelical Protestants were agitated in 1843, whether they expected the literal end of the world or not.⁹

Although Truth may not have shared all the Millerites' expectations or their frenzy in moments of extraordinary agitation, they did not hesitate to recommend her good preaching to their brethren. Through invitations extended at Second Advent meetings at which she preached, Truth followed a Millerite network on Long Island and then crossed into Connecticut. Walking up the Connecticut River Valley from New Haven to Hartford and Springfield, Massachusetts, she made her way finally to the utopian Northampton Association, where for the first time she encountered Garrisonian abolitionism.

It might first seem odd that Millerites steered Truth to the Northampton Association. Expecting the world to end momentarily, Millerites in 1843 were completely preoccupied with preparations for the millennium. Many of them, however, had once been active in moral reforms such as abolitionism, and the connection between Millerite millennialism and utopianism was also close.¹⁰ The people in the Northampton Association were not particularly enthusiastic about their religion, especially considering the agitation that characterized the time, but they did have radical plans to regenerate the nation. Through the cooperative production of silk, they wanted to initiate the reformation of the political economy. Not only was slavery a blot on the American polity, but the economy, still depressed after the Panic of 1837, also seemed out of joint.

The Northampton Association attracted reform-minded visitors, abolitionists and supporters of women's rights like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. One of the Northampton Association's founders, George Benson, was Garrison's brother-in-law. While living in Connecticut in the mid-1830s, Benson had defended the Quaker school mistress Prudence Crandall after townspeople and the state legislature persecuted her for having admitted black girls to her school. Like Benson, the other members of the association were idealists, and they broke with community norms by allowing blacks access to their community.

In the Northampton Association Sojourner Truth encountered well-educated people whose main concerns were social rather than religious. She embraced abolitionism and women's rights and began to address antislavery audiences more often than camp meetings. In the late 1840s, after the Northampton Association dissolved, she joined the antislavery lecture circuit, speaking and selling signed postcards and The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, which she had dictated to Olive Gilbert, a Connecticut abolitionist, and published herself in 1850. Her sale of the book to antislavery and women's rights audiences allowed her to support herself and to pay off the mortgage of her home in Northampton. In 1851 she went to the women's rights convention in Akron primarily to sell her book, and Frances Dana Gage reports that indeed she did a brisk business on the first day.

When Truth and white feminist leaders met in Akron in 1851, the outspokenness of the one and the silence of the others might have seemed natural, given the very different routes they apparently had traveled. Feminist abolitionists had begun to seek their own rights within the antislavery community, but Truth had come out of religious cults and an itinerant ministry.¹¹ Like the prophet Matthias, she had changed her name when God told her to preach her truth. Like the Millerites, she gloried in massive outdoor camp meetings. And like other black women preachers, she heeded her inner spiritual voice and spoke up when the spirit moved her.

Although Truth may have been an unusual character in Akron, she was only one of several black female preachers active in the antebellum North. They, too, published autobiographies: Jarena Lee in 1839 and 1849; Zilpha Elaw, who preached in England for five years, in 1846; and Nancy Prince in 1850, the year Sojourner Truth's Narrative appeared. Nancy Prince was no stranger to women's rights or antislavery circles; indeed she spoke at the fifth national women's rights convention in Philadelphia in 1854. These northern women came out of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and reached wide audiences with messages of conversion and sanctification similar to Sojourner Truth's. Rebecca Cox Jackson also began in the AME Church and went on to become a Shaker eldress. If not for Truth's residence in the Northampton Association and her well-publicized advocacy of what we now consider secular reforms, she would belong wholly to this tradition of black women preachers.¹² But she built an enduring reputation on the antislavery feminist circuit over the years, and white women rather than black were her companions and filled her audiences.

Not only Truth's religious history but also her socioeconomic background would seem to contrast starkly with that of most other women at the Akron meeting. Whereas Truth had grown up as poor as could be, a slave on a farm in upstate New York, many antislavery women leaders—white women like Lucy Stone and Abby Kelley, and black women like Sarah Mapps Douglass and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper of Philadelphia—came from urban backgrounds. Also, like Stone, Kelley, Douglass, and Harper, leading antislavery women were from middle- and upper-middle-class families and consequently had a good deal more education and money than most of their female contemporaries, including Sojourner Truth. And like Frances Dana Gage, many had grown up in reform-minded homes and had long been exposed to discussions of moral reform (e.g., temperance) and politics.¹³

Many feminist abolitionists came to advocate women's rights after experiencing frustration in their antislavery work, but they found that acting on their convictions did not come easily. Often antebellum women who became feminists were not able effortlessly to move into the public realm. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton discovered, women raised to stay at home had to overcome shyness, inexperience in public speaking and in presiding over meetings, familial and community hostility, and the pressures of housekeeping and childrearing. These conditions explain Frances Gage's nervousness chairing the 1851 Akron meeting where Sojourner Truth spoke up.¹⁴

In common with women preachers through the ages, Truth had surmounted these barriers long ago. In the 1820s she had left her husband and four of her five children in Ulster County; by 1851 all her children lived apart from her and consumed none of her time and energy. She had already addressed camp meetings by the score. As an independent and, as she said, self-made woman, Truth could speak out in 1851 with the self-confidence that came from long experience. But did these experiences truly distinguish Truth from other women's rights abolitionists? Not necessarily.

A closer look at other antislavery feminists and at the 1851 meeting in Akron blurs easy distinctions. Two of the most salient figures at the Akron convention, Gage and journalist Jane Swisshelm, were better educated than Truth, but had, like Truth and many other early nineteenth-century Americans, grown up on farms. But if access to education separated Truth, who was illiterate, from other women who were journalists and school teachers, religion united them. Quakers, who recognized the right of women to preach, often supplied the common thread. Abby Kelley, Amy Post, and Sarah and Angelina Grimké, among feminist abolitionists, were or had been Quakers. Others, particularly those who lectured in public, shared with Truth a penchant for Quaker dress and close association with Quakers. Like Truth, other female leaders conceived of their mission in religious terms yet were deeply critical of organized churches and clergy. In 1854, Lucretia Mott spoke for all women's rights advocates: “It is not Christianity, but priestcraft that has subjected woman as we find her.”¹⁵ Their belief in the cause of the slave as a religious duty led antislavery feminists to lecture and write messages such as Angelina Grimké's 1836 An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. (Like Truth, Angelina Grimké had been caught up in the Millerite fervor of 1843.)¹⁶

Just as the contrast between Truth's religious beliefs and experience as a public speaker and those of the female antislavery leadership does not hold up well under closer examination, distinctions of education, religiosity, and style are even more difficult to sustain when we compare Sojourner Truth with the rank and file of the women's rights and antislavery movements. Throughout New England, upstate New York, and the old Northwest, the farming and working people who opposed slavery were also camp meeting followers, adherents of strenuous, evangelical religion, utopian communitarians, and devotees of spirit rappers and water cures. Truth's speeches to various overlapping communities of reformers were carried in a variety of periodicals. What at first glance appear to be discrete worlds of reform were fractured yet extensively overlapping. Women's rights supporters were likely to oppose slavery, criticize the clergy, follow the Graham diet, believe William Miller, and place more faith in the dictates of spirits than of medical doctors. And Sojourner Truth was a familiar presence among all these predominantly white reform communities.¹⁷

It was not so much that Truth had followed one, singular, brave, and public route to Akron while the white women had traveled a more private, fearful one. Truth had her road, Gage had hers, and other women had theirs. All these myriad avenues—through camp meetings, utopian communities, abolitionism, journalism, and temperance—led to women's rights. How, then, was Frances Dana Gage able to draw so clear a distinction between Truth and the white women in Akron? Answering this question requires an examination of discourse rather than personal narrative.

Frances Dana Gage's report of Sojourner Truth's speech is usually taken as a faithful transcript, as though what Gage wrote exactly captures the tenor of the meeting, the actions of the preachers, the chagrin of the organizers, and the wording of Truth's remarks. Gage's report, the most dramatic account of the meeting, has become definitive, but it is not the only one. The secretary of the meeting, a journalist friend of Sojourner Truth's named Marius Robinson, was the president of the Western Anti-Slavery Society. He published lengthy accounts of the proceedings for the newspaper he edited, the Salem, Ohio, Anti-Slavery Bugle. Although they acknowledge the power of Sojourner Truth's remarks, Robinson's reports also give voice to the other participants.

The picture of the Akron meeting that emerges from the pages of the Bugle contradicts Gage in several regards, starting with the call to the conference, which ran in several reform newspapers in the spring of 1851 and appealed to “all the friends of Reform, in whatever department engaged.” The call cited four evils that women's rights would combat: war, intemperance, sensuality, and slavery. Rather than fearing contamination by the antislavery cause, as Gage asserts, the organizers deliberately reached out to abolitionists.¹⁸

Robinson reports the women's spirited discussions, citing particularly the frequent contributions of the fervent Pittsburgh journalist, Jane Swisshelm, and of Emma Coe, a popular women's rights lecturer from Michigan. At one point a Mr. Sterling protested that men were talking too much and recommended their restraint. Mary A. W. Johnson dissented, reminding everyone that men as well as women were welcome to the floor. Robinson sums up approvingly: “The business of the Convention was principally conducted by the women.” He features the speeches of Gage and Truth in separate articles, for Gage had delivered an effective keynote, and Truth's was “one of the most unique and interesting speeches” of the convention, thanks to “her powerful form, her whole-souled, earnest gestures, and … strong and truthful tones.” But according to Robinson, the other women in attendance were neither, as Gage would have them, silent nor discomfited. The meeting included enough other women with public speaking experience that Sojourner Truth did not stand out only for that reason.¹⁹ Accounts in other newspapers also emphasize the liveliness of the proceedings and mention Frances Dana Gage, Emma Coe, and Jane Swisshelm by name.²⁰

Frances Dana Gage, who often published commentary and fiction under the pen name of Aunt Fanny, was a far more creative and experienced writer than Marius Robinson. She dramatized Sojourner Truth's presence much better than he did. In Gage's scenario, the featureless organizers of the convention “tremble” when Truth appears in all her physical strength. Whereas Robinson mentions merely Truth's “powerful form,” Gage supplies a vivid image of “this almost Amazon form, which stood nearly six feet high, head erect, and eyes piercing the upper air like one in a dream,” whose first words produce “a profound hush.” Gage's Truth bares a tremendously muscular right arm, pulls herself up to her full six feet, and has a voice like thunder. The words that Gage quotes Truth speaking are commanding, and they emanate from a superhuman body.

Gage's sketch of Truth, first published in 1863, was influenced by another writer of far greater renown whose portrait of Truth had already reached a vast audience. Harriet Beecher Stowe was famous as the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin and other novels and stories when she published “Sojourner Truth, The Libyan Sibyl” in the April 1863 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Stow made some mistakes. She thought, for instance, that Truth was dead. Such errors did not prevent the essay from becoming the most popular rendition of Truth at midcentury. For the next twenty-five years, other Truth biographers, including Gage, repeated (sometimes with variations, as was the case with Gage) the Libyan Sibyl appellation that Stowe had used.²¹

Stowe places less emphasis than Gage on Truth's physical presence and accentuates the exotic nature of Truth's persona: “No pen, however, can give an adequate ideal of Sojourner Truth. This unlettered African woman, with her deep religious and trustful nature burning in her soul like fire, has a magnetic power over an audience [that is] perfectly astounding.” Whereas Gage's Truth is a voice in a powerful body, Stowe's Truth is an amusing native, an African whose insight gushes, untamed, out of her nature. Stowe contrasts the untutored Truth with the eminent clergymen who are her houseguests. Gage uses a similar strategy of opposition, contrasting potent Truth with insipid white women. Both quote Truth speaking in dialect while white characters speak cultured, standard English. Truth emerges from both essays as a colorful force of nature profoundly different from lackluster (white) people like the authors.

Other descriptions of Truth also stress her singularity. Frederick Douglass called her a “strange compound of wit and wisdom, of wild enthusiasm and flint-like common sense.” She was, he said, “a genuine specimen of the uncultured negro” who cared nothing for “elegance of speech or refinement of manners. She seemed to please herself and others best when she put her ideas in the oddest forms.”²² The newspapers reprinted in the second part of the 1875/78 and 1884 editions of The Narrative of Sojourner Truth also underscore her differentness, portraying her as “this interesting and decidedly original character,” “unique, witty, pathetic, sensible,” “a child of nature, gifted beyond the common measure, witty, shrewd, sarcastic, with an open, broad honesty of heart, and unbounded kindness.”²³

Sojourner Truth's appeal was at once broader than race and deeply rooted in Americans' notions about the connection between blackness and slavery. Educated Americans have long been attracted to naifs, whether or not of African descent. Truth's unaffected religiosity gave her access to large American audiences. The prophetic, evangelical style that Truth employed has struck Americans as embodying more authenticity and more fundamental truth than the more educated rhetoric derived from the law and from written sermons. Truth's mode of expression owes much to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Methodists, who invented the art of preaching—as opposed to sermonizing—and within fifty years grew into the largest American denomination. Nineteenth-century Americans were susceptible to inspired preaching, and Truth was first and foremost a preacher who gloried in divine inspiration. Elaborating on the Bible more than on the news from Washington, Sojourner Truth's message was thoroughly steeped in biblical imagery, and her text was intimately familiar to all her fellow citizens. To those numerous nineteenth-century Americans whose basic education had come from the Bible and whose religion was evangelical, Sojourner Truth would have been a persuasive purveyor of enduring and fundamental wisdom.

Truth was unforgettable for two reasons. First, she was a forceful speaker—like Frances Dana Gage, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Emma Coe, Nancy Prince, and Jane Swisshelm. Second, she presented herself as a woman who had been a slave; she made her persona as different from the educated white women who made her famous as they thought it possible to be. Even though the opportunities for women to speak in public were relatively circumscribed and always controversial in the first half of the nineteenth century, as a woman speaker Truth had many peers. Actresses were seldom considered entirely respectable; spiritual mediums spoke only while in a trance. But women preachers, Quakers or not, spoke in churches and camp meetings. Women lecturers like Emma Coe talked about great American women in schoolhouses, churches, and meeting halls. Sojourner Truth had addressed audiences in each of these venues and had been recognized as a fine performer for twenty years before she went to Akron.

Truth had also crafted a persona that appealed enormously to educated white Americans. Her manipulation of the imagery of slavery and difference recommended her to talented publicists who guaranteed her place in the history of antislavery feminism. Gage's portrait, emphasizing Truth's body, reinforces notions that Truth herself asserted: that her experience in slavery—in which she worked like a man, suffered the loss of many children through sale, and felt a mother's grief but had no solace—lent her a potency that the white women at the meeting in Akron lacked, no matter how well they had been educated.

Unquestionably Sojourner Truth constructed her public persona to establish that what had happened to her—her enslavement—rather than her reason lent her a unique wisdom. She always reminded audiences that she had been a slave and that she remembered what slavery meant. If Gage quotes her accurately in 1851 when she says she lost thirteen children, Truth had appropriated her mother's sad experience of bearing and losing to slavery more than ten children. In fact, Sojourner Truth had five children, one of whom was sold away from her but whom she recovered. By the 1870s Truth had added a decade to her time as a slave. She knew full well that her experience in slavery authenticated her being and reinforced her message, whether she was speaking antislavery, women's rights, or freedman's relief. And indeed, taking their cue from Truth, most readers conclude with Gage that Truth embodied some fundamental characteristic of blackness rooted in slavery, some power of race in rhetorically concentrated form.

Black slavery, Truth realized, was more memorable than black freedom for most Americans. Even the relatively enlightened communities of abolitionists focused more easily on abuses against the enslaved than on discrimination against the free. Again and again, free blacks in the antislavery movement had to remind their colleagues of their own situation, for the cause of the slave seemed so much more romantic and attractive. For many white abolitionists (William Lloyd Garrison, the Grimké sisters, and Abby Kelley were exceptions), free blacks existed in a conceptual limbo in which they were unseen or uninteresting or distasteful. Whereas other black women abolitionists became as much as possible like educated Americans, Truth emphasized her otherness by reciting her experiences as a slave. Widening the distance between herself and her audiences, Truth took maximum advantage of being exotic.

Truth resisted or ignored the temptation, as Frederick Douglass did not, to create an educated persona to display the benefits of freedom. Douglass recalled her poking fun at him as he remade himself: “[Truth] seemed to feel it her duty to trip me up in my speeches and to ridicule my efforts to speak and act like a person of cultivation and refinement.” Douglass, like most other African American abolitionists, made one choice; Truth made another. As historian Carleton Mabee has noted, she remained illiterate despite many efforts to instruct her as an adult. Other former slaves, like Douglass and J. W. C. Pennington, associated literacy with freedom and presented themselves to the public as educated people.²⁴ Truth claimed that God inspired her, and she disdained education in lecturers or clergy. By stressing the inspirational aspect of her speaking gift and downplaying self-conscious preparation, she dispensed with any need for education, the very attainment that many other blacks in the antislavery movement most prized.

Truth also used her body in ways that women who were not actresses did not dare. Old and black and modestly dressed, she obliterated the sexual aspect of womanliness that youth, beauty, and lightness of skin would have accentuated. Yet Truth intentionally exhibited her body, and her American public recorded the occasions. She showed her arm in its full length 1851 and bared her breast in 1858, defining her womanliness and, miraculously, representing the essence of worker and mother rather than that of whore. Here her age, color, and naiveté served her well, for the figure of the light-skinned, ladylike Negro woman symbolized the enslaved fancy girl, whose sexuality—which could be bought and sold—was her most salient characteristic.

Sojourner Truth was not selling herself, at least not literally. But her gestures, sensational for the time, definitely enhanced her career. Truth followed a practice that was (and still is) common on American lecture circuits. Like Frederick Douglass and others who had published their autobiographies or other writing, she sold her books to reform-minded audiences whose curiosity had been whetted by her personal appearance. This tactic worked equally well for Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a black teacher and poet who joined the antislavery lecture circuit in the 1850s. The free-born Harper toured under the auspices of the Maine Anti-Slavery Society, selling not a slave narrative but two volumes of poetry, Forest Leaves (1845) and Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1853).

Harper gained considerable respect as both poet and lecturer before the Civil War. After emancipation she taught in the South, and after Reconstruction she headed the Colored Division of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. In 1892 she published Iola Leroy, one of the earliest novels by an African American. For nearly half a century, Harper was active in the various reform movements that attracted the support of American women. Scholars like Hazel Carby, Frances Smith Foster, and Bettye Collier-Thomas have investigated her life and work.²⁵ Besides Frances Harper, Sojourner Truth had several other black women contemporaries in feminist abolitionism. Two pioneers of black women's history, Gerda Lerner and Dorothy Sterling, have edited documents that illuminate the lives of antislavery feminists such as Sarah Mapps Douglass (the most active black member of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, correspondent of Sarah Grimké's for forty years) and Sarah Parker Remond (born into an antislavery family in Salem, Massachusetts, an antislavery lecturer in New England and Great Britain in the 1850s). Marilyn Richardson has republished the speeches and essays of the Boston lecturer Maria Stewart. A popular speaker in the early 1830s, Stewart formulated phrases that Sojourner Truth came close to echoing: “What if I am a woman; is not the God of ancient times the God of these modern days?”²⁶

The names of Harper, Douglass, Remond, and Stewart occasionally appear in passing in histories of abolitionism and in the three volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage. Although they are now becoming better known and their work is being reprinted, none has her portrait on a postage stamp, as has Sojourner Truth since 1986. Their lives and works remain the stuff of scholarly research, not of popular legend. Why this invisibility? On the one hand, as mostly light-skinned, ladylike women of African descent, they resembled too closely the stereotypical enslaved fancy girl; on the other hand, they were too much like their white women peers to seem memorable. But mostly, because they were very obviously free, the exotic character of the slave-woman victim has obliterated their existence. Educated, free black women have come very close, in fact, to vanishing entirely from the annals of antislavery and women's rights. To explain this near disappearance we must return to the phrase associated with Sojourner Truth: “and ar'n't I a woman?” Truth—and Stewart, Harper, Douglass, and Remond—saw themselves as women; their own womanly identity was secure. But the culture in which they lived seldom accorded them complete female identity. Even Frances Dana Gage quotes Truth presenting her statement in the form of a question, which she does not answer straightforwardly. Gage does not let Truth proclaim “Yes, I am a woman!” Instead, the rhetorical query leaves room for doubt. Most Americans in the middle of the nineteenth century would not even have thought to formulate such a question regarding black women or poor women of any race; as woman, these figures would have been invisible.

Had the question been posed, however, the short answer would most likely have been No. One of the era's most prominent antislavery feminists provides an example. In 1863, as several antislavery feminists were launching a petition drive to enact an amendment to the United State Constitution prohibiting slavery, Susan B. Anthony wrote to Elizabeth Cady Stanton that she planned to field teams of lecturers who would rally public support. Each team would consist of three people: “a white man, black man & a woman.” Another women's rights advocate, Jane Swisshelm, followed the logic of her time when she spoke of “woman's rights” as opposed to the rights of “colored men.” Swisshelm, like many of her colleagues in feminism, also deleted working-class women from the collectivity she called “woman.” Certainly, white women's rights supporters were far from unified when they defined woman, and Parker Pillsbury and Frances Dana Gage insisted on including women who were black. By and large, however, the women who spoke up for “woman” did not have poor white women and women of color in mind.²⁷

This way of thinking has proved amazingly durable. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century human sciences like anthropometry and phrenology routinely paired white women and men of color, as though women of color did not, need not, exist. The white woman/black man parallel that ignores black women inspired Gloria. T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith to include it in the subtitle of their 1982 anthology of black women's writing, “All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave.” Describing her experiences in the Harvard Law School in the 1970s, Patricia Williams recalls feeling utterly invisible.²⁸ With educated white women as woman and black men as the slave, free, articulate black women simply vanished. What little social category existed for black woman was reserved for the slave: if dark-skinned, as mother; if light-skinned, as sexual victim. Even to their compatriots in reform, educated free black women were not engaging enough to attract publicists who had a keen eye out for drama, like Frances Dana Gage and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Sojourner Truth, in contrast, purposefully anchored herself in slavery. She employed a naive persona, which until the second half of the twentieth century was the most certain means for a black woman to secure individual recognition in American public life. In the twentieth century, Mary McLeod Bethune and Zora Neale Hurston used the naive persona to advance their interests with powerful white Americans in politics, education, and the arts. All three women came under criticism from other blacks for reinforcing unfortunate stereotypes of the-black-as-ignorant-primitive at the same time that they struck educated whites as quaintly and picturesquely charming.

Sojourner Truth asked whether she were a woman, without making herself into one at the time. She and other black women who employed her strategy did not erase the barrier between themselves and woman. Not-woman, they seemed to be something else—authentic, powerful, native—that was memorable. To appear in the eyes of most Americans to be both memorable and woman at the same time was not possible for nineteenth-century black women. Black women's individual experience had either to be reconstructed as something emblematically Negro—that is, as enslaved—or to be erased. In the nineteenth century, Frances Dana Gage did not let Sojourner Truth answer her own rhetorical question unequivocally, because for most of their compatriots, if not for themselves, blackness was exiled from the category of woman.

Notes

1. For more information on Frances Dana Gage (1808-1884), see Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer, eds., Notable American Women (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 1:2-4.

2. [Olive Gilbert and Frances W. Titus], Narrative of Sojourner Truth; A Bondswoman of Olden Time Emancipated by the New York Legislature in the Early Part of the Present Century; with a History of Her Labors and Correspondence Drawn from Her “Book of Life” (Battle Creek, Mich., 1878, rpt. New York, 1968, and Salem, N.H., 1990), pp. 131-35. This narrative went through several reprintings and three main editions: the first, in 1850; the second, which added material from Truth's scrapbook in 1875/1878; and the third, which added a memorial section in 1884, after her death.

3. Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven, 1989), p. 81.

4. Narrative of Sojourner Truth, pp. 59-60.

5. Ibid., p. 68.

6. Gilbert Vale, Fanaticism; Its Source and Influence, Illustrated by the Simple Narrative of Isabella, in the Case of Matthias, Mr. and Mrs. B. Folger, Mr. Pierson, Mr. Mills, Catherine, Isabella, &c. &c. (New York, 1835), p. 18; Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (Ithaca, 1950), p. 240.

7. Vale, Fanaticism, pp. 19-41.

8. New York Courier and Enquirer, April 17, 1835; New York Sun, April 20, 1835.

9. Ruth Alden Doan, “Millerism and Evangelical Culture,” in Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler, eds., The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), pp. 118-22.

10. Michael Barkun, Crucible of the Millennium: The Burned-Over District of New York in the 1840s (Syracuse, 1986), pp. 8, 31, 97-98; Ronald D. Graybill, “The Abolitionist-Millerite Connection,” in Numbers and Butler, eds., The Disappointed, pp. 139, 146.

11. Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca, 1978), p. 24.

12. William L. Andrews, ed., Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), pp. 2-3; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 6 vols. (Rochester, N.Y., 1889-1922, rpt. New York, 1970), 1:384; Nellie McKay, “Nineteenth-Century Black Women's Spiritual Autobiographies: Religious Faith and Self-Empowerment,” in Joy Webster Barbre et al., eds., Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Urbana, 1989), pp. 137-54.

13. Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionism in America (Chicago, 1978), pp. 17, 121-36.

14. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, pp. 24-25.

15. Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, 1:380.

16. Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition (New York, 1967), pp. 306-8.

17. Recent feminist scholarship refigures the categorization of women's reform. Nancy Hewitt's Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1872 (Ithaca, 1984), a study of women's activism in Rochester (a city in which Sojourner Truth had very good friends and spent a great deal of time), outlines three communities of women's reform, all of which were tinged more or less with Protestant Christianity. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York, 1981), testifies to the unrestricted reach of antislavery societies in Oneida and Utica, New York, in the 1830s. Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston, 1989), illustrates the tight relationship between spiritualism and other social reforms like women's rights at midcentury. Jean Fagan Yellin's Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven, 1989), focusing on the iconography of women's abolitionism, traces the racial heterogeneity in feminists' cultural productions.

18. Salem, Ohio, Anti-Slavery Bugle, March 29, April 2 and 5, 1851. In the spring of 1851, Oliver Johnson was editing the Bugle. Marius Robinson succeeded him at midyear.

19. Ibid., June 7, 14, and 21, 1851.

20. For example, the New York Anti-Slavery Standard, June 26, 1851, and the Rochester Daily American, June 4, 1851.

21. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl,” Atlantic Monthly, 11, no. 66 (April 1863): 480. My analysis of Stowe's essay differs from Jean Yellin's excellent discussion in Women and Sisters, pp. 81-87, in that Yellin stresses the transcendent passivity and mystery of Stowe's “Libyan Sibyl.”

22. Frederick Douglass, “What I Found at the Northampton Association,” in Charles A. Sheffeld, ed., History of Florence, Massachusetts. Including a Complete Account of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry (Florence, Mass., 1895), pp. 131-32.

23. Narrative of Sojourner Truth, pp. 201, 221, 227.

24. Douglass, “What I Found at the Northampton Association,” p. 132; Carleton Mabee, “Sojourner Truth, Bold Prophet: Why Did She Never Learn to Read?” New York History 86 (January 1988): 55-77.

25. For Harper, see Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1984), pp. 159-64. See also Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York, 1987); Frances Smith Foster, ed., A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York, 1990); and Bettye Collier-Thomas, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Abolitionist and Feminist Reformer (Chapel Hill, forthcoming).

26. Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York, 1972); Sterling, We Are Your Sisters, pp. 126-33, 175-80; Marilyn Richardson, ed., Maria W. Stewart, America's First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), p. 68. See also Dorothy B. Porter, “Sarah Parker Remond, Abolitionist and Physician,” Journal of Negro History 20 (July 1935): 287-93; Ruth Bogin, “Sarah Parker Remond: Black Abolitionist from Salem,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 110 (April 1974): 120-50; R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Anti-Slavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge, 1983); R. J. M. Blackett, Beating against the Barriers: Biographical Essays in Nineteenth-Century Afro-American History (Baton Rouge, 1986); and Dorothy Sterling, Black Foremothers: Three Lives, 2d ed. (New York, 1988).

27. Anthony quoted in Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York, 1991), p. 338, emphasis in original; Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter, November 23, 1850.

28. Nancy Leys Stepan, “Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science,” in David Theo Goldberg, ed., Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis, 1990), p. 47; Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (Old Westbury, N.Y., 1982); Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 55-56, 222.