January 16, 2019 • 37 mins
Last time, we talked about Sojourner Truth's enslavement and how a religious vision after she was free led her to moving to New York City. Today, we’re picking up with another vision, which marked a huge shift in how she lived her life.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. We are
picking up where we left off last time in the
story of Sojourner Truth. Last time we talked about her
(00:23):
enslavement in the Hudson River Valley in New York and
how a religious vision after she was free led to
her moving to New York City. Today we are picking
up with another vision, which marked another huge shift in
how she lived her life. And since this is a
two parter, I really recommend listening to part one first.
We're gonna directly refer to it a few times, including
(00:43):
right out of the gate. So after the collapse of
Father Matthias's religious community the Kingdom, Isabelle has spent several
difficult years in New York City. She felt as though
everything she had tried to do in New York had failed,
and she felt like she herself had failed as well.
She wasn't generous enough, she wasn't kind enough. She felt
that she was too selfish and greedy. An example she
(01:06):
gave in her narrative was that a man where she
was living would give her a dollar to hire a
poor person to clear the walk, but she would clear
the walk herself and keep that money, reasoning that she
needed it because she was poor too. And in eighteen
forty three she began to see herself as quote unfeeling
selfish and wicked. On June one, eight forty three, she
(01:28):
had another religious experience in which she felt called to
completely change her life, to leave the city of New
York and to go east and preach, as had happened
and the experience that had led her to go to
New York earlier. This happened around Pentecost. She put a
few things into a pillow case. She told the woman
who ran the house where she was staying that she
(01:50):
was leaving, and she said that she had a new name.
That new name was so Journal. When asked why she
was going east, she said, quote, the spirit calls me there,
and I must go east. Really meant going across Long Island,
and along the way, she asked God what her last
name should be, and the name that came to her
was Truth, So Journal. Truth's time as an itinerant preacher
(02:12):
happened during the religious revival known as the Second Grade Awakening,
but more specifically, a man named William Miller had been
developing a huge following. His followers came to be known
as Miller Writes. In eighteen twenty two, based on a
series of complicated equations, he announced that he had determined
the day that Christ would return to Earth, at which
(02:33):
point the righteous would ascend to Heaven. When he had
made this announcement back in eighteen two, hadn't named a
specific date when this is going to happen, but some
of his followers had put forth the day of March
eighteen forty three. That date had already come and gone
when so Journal took her new name and started traveling east.
(02:53):
But Miller had said from the start that Christ could
come as late as eighteen forty four, so as so
Journal Truth was traveling along Long Island, the Millerites were
eagerly awaiting this event, which was now expected to happen
on March onety four. So Journer herself was not a Millerite,
and she didn't think Miller's predictions were accurate at all,
(03:15):
but the popularity of the movement really paved the way
for her preaching. Tent meetings were a big part of it,
and there were other women preachers at these meetings, including
other black women, so there were places that she could
preach with a congregation there to hear her. People were
also really ready for her style of preaching, which was
really dynamic and energetic and very well versed in scripture.
(03:39):
It was infused with the perfectionist ideas that people could
free themselves from sin through willpower and religion. It was
full of her own lived experiences and her own understanding
of God and of the Bible. She had a very informal,
kind of folksy way of speaking, and she had a
very striking appearance. Thanks to her height of nearly six
feet and her ay for smoking a pipe. Her reputation
(04:02):
started to really spread, and she started arriving at tent
meetings to find out that people were really hoping she
would be one of the people who was coming there
to preach. A series of predicted dates for the Millerites
return of Christ came and went. The last of those
dates was October twenty eighteen forty four, which became known
as the Great Disappointment. The Millerite movement fell apart after that,
(04:24):
but many of its members continued on with their religious work.
These included Ellen Harmon, who later married James White and
co founded the Seventh Day Inventist Church. So after the
Great Disappointment, Truth kept in touch with a lot of
the same people, moving through the Seventh day Adventist circles
the way that she had moved through the Millerites. By
that point, so jour in her Truth had moved to
(04:46):
Massachusetts and had joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry,
which was also called the Community. This was a utopian
community that was centered on a silk mill, and that
silk mill was communally operated by the commun unity members
as free labor. This was a somewhat unexpected place for
Truth to end up. Even though Massachusetts has a strong
(05:08):
connection to the movement for the abolition of slavery, Northampton
was really conservative. It was a popular vacation spot for
slave owners from the South, and racism was prolific in
the area surrounding the community. It was also kind of
unexpected considering what had happened the last time. So journal
Truth joined a communal living situation, which we talked about
(05:29):
in Part one. But the Northampton Association of Education and
Industry was so much different from Father Matthias's Kingdom. The
community was home to reformers and radicals that had been
founded by ten families who believed in the abolition of
slavery and the granting of full citizenship rights to free
black people. Although there were some religious elements to all this,
(05:52):
in general, the community was really about trying to abolish
slavery and inequality, not about proselytizing. The community also had
more liberal views on gender. Everyone in the community was
allowed to choose what work to do, with the exception
of preparing mulberry leaves, which was necessary for everyone to
help with, and this meant that women were not just
(06:12):
put into domestic roles by default. We've talked about several
utopian communities on previous episodes, and one of the difficulties
that we have talked about, and several of them, is
members of the community not really pulling their own weight
in terms of keeping the whole thing running. People a
lot of times joined utopian communities with kind of an
idealistic idea of of how that's going to go, and
(06:35):
it really turns out to involve a lot of incredibly
hard work that people aren't necessarily ready for at the community.
So journal truth, worked incredibly hard, and she was also
one of the people who kept everyone else in line
when it came to doing their share of the work.
She held everyone else to extremely high standards, but she
held herself to those same standards as well. Two of
(06:56):
Sojourner's daughters, Elizabeth and Sophia, joined her at the community
in eighteen forty four, and this reunion was both joyous
and challenging. So Journer hadn't always been able to be
close to her daughters, both because of their enslavement and
because of her religious work in New York City, so
it was actually pretty difficult for the three of them
(07:16):
to try to build a close relationship now that the
girls were in their late teens. Plus, Sophia was pregnant
by a man that she had been living with, and
that carried a lot of emotional baggage for so Journer.
There were questions surrounding some of Sojourner's own pregnancies, and
these were questions that she mostly avoided now that she
was living as a preacher. But aside from that, she
(07:37):
regretted not being able to be more present in her
daughter's lives to possibly bring them to a different outcome
than the one that she had had herself. While living
at the community, so Journer began meeting and developing connections
with prominent figures in the movements for abolition and women's rights.
This included William Lloyd, Garrison's brother in law, George Benson,
(07:58):
and in eighteen forty four, Rison himself. Connecticut abolitionists also
used the community as their headquarters. The American Anti Slavery
Society had split in eighteen forty because some of its
members found Garrison's beliefs to be too radical, and once
that happened, Garrison's supporters had no formal organization in Connecticut,
so they organized from the community instead. Just to note,
(08:21):
among Garrison's more radical beliefs that caused this split, where
that the United States Government should be totally rebuilt to
be anti slavery from its foundation, rather than trying to
add anti slavery reforms to the existing government. So Journer
also met Frederick Douglass at the community, and in his
What I Found at the Northampton Association he described her
(08:44):
this way, I met here for the first time, that
strange compound of wit and wisdom, of wild enthusiasm and
flint like common sense, who 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. I allude to sojourner truth. She
(09:04):
was a genuine specimen of the uncultured negro. She cared
little for elegance or refinement of manners. She seemed to
please herself and others best when she put her ideas
in the oddest forms. She was much respected at Florence,
for she was honest, industrious, and amiable. Her quaint speeches
easily gave her an audience, and she was one of
(09:26):
the most useful members of the community in its day
of small things. There's just so much going on in
that discreption. Well, and it's also I have always enjoyed
his writing because even though this is pros, the cadence
of it feels very poetic to me, Like I just
like the way he assembles numbers of syllables together in
(09:47):
one sentence. It's very pleasing. Yeah, Florence was sort of
the place in Northampton where all of this was going on.
And it's clear from this that um Frederick Douglas in
some ways really respec acted her and in some ways
didn't really and also that she did not necessarily have
(10:07):
a lot of patients for Frederick Douglas. Sometimes I imagine
he really respected her but found her to be a
pain in the neck. Okay, that's the vibe I get
from this. Yeah. Yeah. It was also in Northampton, That's
so Journer Truth and all of Gilbert collaborated on Sojourner's autobiography,
and we will talk about that after a quick sponsor break.
(10:35):
While living in Northampton, so Journer Truth worked with all
of Gilbert to write her autobiography, and the result was
the narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Bondswoman of Olden Time,
first published in eighteen fifty. It was published along with
statements from white abolitionists attesting to so Journer's character into
the validity of the book. By that point, the community
(10:56):
itself had dissolved, but several of its members had remained
in Northampton. So Journer was introduced to Olives through a
mutual friend, probably Sarah Benson. Both Sarah and Sojourner were
taking the Water Cure at David Ruggles Hydrotherapy Center in Florence, Massachusetts,
which is part of Northampton Ruggles. Was one of the
abolitionists who helped Frederick Douglas escape from slavery, as well
(11:18):
as being the first black bookseller in the United States.
He died in eighteen forty nine, which was a huge
blow to the abolitionist movement and to Sojourner Truth personally.
Olive and so Journer worked together on the autobiography because
so Journer hadn't learned to read or write. A very
few copies of her signature that exists today really resemble
(11:39):
a child's earliest attempts to write their names, and there's
been a lot of speculation about why this is. It
was not common at all for enslaved people in New
York to be taught to read or write, But by
the late eighteen forties, when she was working on this book,
so Journer had been free for about fifteen years, and
she had also been surrounded by educated, affluent people, especially
(12:00):
during her time at the Northampton community. It's really likely
that several of these people would have encouraged her to
learn to read or offered to teach her themselves. So
there are a lot of hypotheses for why Sojourner didn't
learn to read after becoming free, and one is that
she may have had a learning disability, a visual perception disorder,
or a psychological block brought on by being sold to
(12:23):
an English speaking home when she spoke only Dutch and
then beaten for not understanding the language that she did
not know. It is also possible that she didn't trust
the act of writing, or that she feared that if
she learned to write, it would weigh down her mind
or crowd out the voice of the Holy Spirit in
her head. Also, this is really a question that is
a lot more common today than it was when she
(12:46):
was living, because it was really common for people not
to know how to read or write, especially people of color,
regardless of whether they've ever been enslaved, and especially women
regardless of their race. Whatever the reason, when sojourn Or
started collaborating with all of Gilbert, she did not know
how to read or write, And the book they created
together is written in the third person, so it reads
(13:08):
more like Olive's observation of what Sojourner told her about
her life, rather than Sojourner's own words directly from her
own mouth. Even so, we don't have really a lot
of reason to doubt the book that they ultimately made together,
and Sojourner stood by it for the rest of her
life and directed people to it when they had questions.
It is also the only narrative we have of an
(13:29):
enslaved person in Dutch New York. It's it's really likely
that that all of influenced things about it, But for
so journous whole life. People would ask her questions and
she'd be like, it's all in the book. So she
she clearly supported it. One of the things that so
journal Truth did with this autobiography was to sell copies
(13:50):
to fund her own needs, her own living, and her
own lecture tours, and she toured extensively. By the eighteen forties,
she was active on a lecture sir It and her
height and her commanding voice and her keen intelligence made
her stand out. She was the first woman to really
come to prominence as a speaker in the abolitionist movement
(14:10):
in the United States. In the eighteen fifties, so journal
embarked on a twenty two state lecture tour. Her speeches
ranged through abolition, women's rights, religion, and the political issues
of the day. This included stridently denouncing the Compromise of
eighteen fifty, which was meant to appease the slave states
after California applied to join the Union as a free
(14:31):
state in eighteen forty nine without a corresponding slave state.
To preserve what was considered the balance. Among other things,
the Compromise of eighteen fifty amended the Fugitive Slave Act.
This eighteen fifty revision to the Act required the United
States government to help slave owners recapture escaped slaves, including
(14:52):
the right to pursue escaped slaves into free territory. There
were also penalties for sheltering or helping escaped slaves, and
every person of African descent was really at risk for
being captured and sold into slavery. This bill was nicknamed
the Bloodhound Bill by its opponents because it was basically like,
(15:13):
We're gonna hire a bunch of bloodhounds to track down
all the escaped people. On October twenty three, and eighteen fifty,
so Journer attended the first National Women's Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts,
and there she gave one of many speeches that connected
the cause of abolition to the cause of women's rights,
and afterward the convention resolved to include quote the trampled
(15:36):
women of the plantation in their advocacy. We have talked
about which of them followed through on that in other
episodes of the show. It's definitely not something where they
had this meeting in Worcester and then immediately all got
on board with the cause of abolition and black women's rights.
In eighteen fifty one, so Journer attended another women's rights
conference in Akron, Ohio, and it was at this one
(15:58):
that she gave her speech that's us known today as
eight iole Woman. Sometimes it's also presented as Aren't Ile Woman,
And we're going to be talking about the speech a
lot more a little bit later in the show, but
this is where it happened in the timeline. Over the
eighteen fifties, so Journer became increasingly well known for her speaking,
which was often at least partly extemporaneous. At least once,
(16:19):
she amused audiences by saying something along the lines of
I have come here out of curiosity to hear what
I have to say. I would love that. She was
also very direct, and she did not back down from
challenging other people. In eighteen fifty two, she was listening
to Frederick Douglas give a speech in Salem, Ohio, in
(16:40):
the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty
He had become more militant, saying, quote, the way to
make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter was to
make a few slave hunters dead men. As he started
calling for enslaved people to rise up by force, so Journer,
who was really not in favor of violence and all this,
called out, Frederick is God Gone? Sometimes this is described
(17:04):
as having happened much later at Faniel Hall in Boston,
with the question being Frederick is God dead? Either way,
she was basically asking Frederick Douglas in public whether he
had lost his faith after the dread Scott decision. In
eighteen fifty seven, she began speaking about the Constitution as
infested with weevils, drawing comparison to a wheat weevil infestation
(17:26):
that had been devastating crops. That same year, she sold
her property in Northampton and bought a small home in
Battle Creek, Michigan, where she became active in the area's
spiritualist community. She was into a lot of trendy practices
of the day, including spiritualism, phrenology, and hydrotherapy. Yeah, we
didn't really mention it earlier, but her book sales and
(17:46):
other work was like it funded things like buying a
house of her own, that kind of stuff. So Journer
also became really known for bucking gender norms in a
very visible way, beyond just her habit of smoking a
pipe in public, and she also got a reputation for
being pretty defiant. The Boston Liberator wrote about one incident
that happened in Indiana in eighteen fifty eight in which
(18:09):
the men in the audience questioned whether she was really
a man in disguise. Here is what they said. Quote.
So Journer told them that her breasts had suckled many
a white babe, to the exclusion of her own offspring,
that some of those white babies had grown to man's estate,
that although they had sucked her colored breasts, they were,
(18:30):
in her estimation, far more manly than they her prosecutors
appeared to be, and she quietly asked them, as she
disrobed her bosom, if they too wished to suck. In
vindication of her truthfulness, she told them she would show
her breast to the whole congregation, that it was not
to her shame that she uncovered her breast before them,
(18:51):
but to their shame. The US Civil War began in
eighteen sixty one, and by that point so Journer was
struggling with her health. She had spent about twenty years
traveling and speaking out against slavery and in favor of
women's rights in the last decade or so, had been
through increasingly dangerous territory as conditions became more violent in
advance of the war. Although her health started to improve
(19:14):
in eighteen sixty three, she just didn't have the kind
of stamina that had been necessary for her long ranging
speaking tours in the eighteen fifties. During the Civil War,
so Journal helped recruit troops to fight for the Union
and encouraged the Union to add the abolition of slavery
to its objectives for the war. In eighteen sixty four,
she met President Abraham Lincoln, and after the war she
(19:35):
moved to Washington, d c. And then to the Freedman's
village in Arlington to try to work with the freed
people and help them adjust to life outside of slavery.
This included teaching the sorts of homemaking skills that people
who had been working in the fields their whole lives
hadn't really had an opportunity to learn. She also helped
care for hospital patients in the years after the war.
In eighteen sixty five, she was supposed to attend a
(19:57):
reception in advance of Lincoln's second and faguration, but she
was turned away on account of her race. Her escort,
Captain George Cars, answered, if she is not good enough
to enter, then I am not. Lincoln later apologized for
that having happened. After the Civil War, Sojourner continued fighting
for civil rights, both through her speaking and through her actions.
(20:20):
She advocated adding women's rights to the Reconstruction Amendments. As
cities started formally segregating by race, she started intentionally boarding
segregated street cars, sometimes staying on board longer than she
needed to just to press the issue. At one point,
this led to a conductor dislocating her shoulder when he
forcibly removed her from the car. She got him fired,
(20:43):
and he was arrested on charges of assault and battery.
She also filed suit against the street car conductor who
tried to keep her from boarding. Life became increasingly difficult
in Washington, d c. As the influx of freed people
sparked a backlash among white residents. Sojourner had been trying
to get freed people jobs in Washington, but she gradually
(21:04):
began relocating people to other cities instead, particularly Rochester, New York.
Eventually she moved back to Battle Creek, Michigan. She renewed
her focus on women's rights, especially black women's rights, along
with helping the poor. In the late eighteen seventies, she
began working on a plan to resettle freed people to
homesteads in the West, although that never came to fruition.
(21:26):
She gave her last public lecture in eighteen eighty one.
By that point, she had met three US presidents and
had spent decades publicly preaching and publicly advocating for abolition,
women's rights, and civil rights. Even so, she had had
to make a habit of carrying a scrap book full
of newspaper clippings about herself and signatures of prominent white
(21:48):
abolitionists and women's rights activists, because otherwise people who hadn't
already heard of her didn't really take her seriously because
of her race. In the last few years of her life,
Sojourner Truth is cared for by her daughters and by
her doctor, John Harvey Kellogg. She died on November three,
at the age of about eighty six, possibly due to
(22:10):
complications of diabetes or gang green. Her last known words
were be a follower of Jesus. But the words that
people are a lot more familiar with from sojourn or
Truth are ain't ile woman. And we will finally get
to that part after one last sponsor break. So, like
(22:34):
we said earlier in the show, So journal Truth gave
the speech that is known today as ain't ile Woman
an akron Ohio in eighteen fifty one, and the most
well known version of this speech was published by Francis
Gage in the New York Independent on April eighteen sixty three.
Earlier that month, Harriet Beecher Stowe had published a story
(22:56):
in the Atlantic called Sojourner Truth the Libyans Sybil, and
this was one year after she published her anti slavery
novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. In the Atlantic article, Stow recounts
meeting Truth quote many years ago, and she relates being
introduced after which Truth says, well, Honey, de lord bless you.
(23:16):
I just thought I'd like to come and have a
look at you use here to me. I reckon. Stowe's
account goes on to portray so Journal Truth as a
very stereotypically Southern slave, with her speech rendered in a
really thick dialect, so thick. I don't know about you, Holly,
I'm not comfortable reading it out loud. Just reading the
part that I just read felt weird and gross, um,
(23:38):
and also a little bit funny to me because, as
we have mentioned, she was not from the South right,
so it makes it super weird and gross. Yeah. Well,
and so we said in the top of part one
that there are a lot of videos on YouTube of
black women performing this speech, and I am not criticizing
any of that at all. I'm saying that, like, the
(23:59):
speech has written in such a thickly dialected way that
for a white woman to try to recreate it feels bad.
In addition to this really really thickly uh presented language,
so also makes a whole bunch of factual errors in
(24:20):
this article, including saying that so journal Truth had been
brought to the United States from Africa, which she was
not she was born in Dutch New York, and also
saying that so journal Truth was as of eighteen sixty
three when the article came out dead, which she was not.
So journal Truth knew about the speech, she was not
(24:41):
fond of it. She pointed out how many elements of
it were wrong, including saying that she did not call
people honey and that she did not refer to people
of her race using the N word, which is from
a part of the article we did not read. The
Atlantic was widely circulated in eighteen sixty three, So this
article is what introduced so journ Truth to a lot
of the United States, especially people who were not already
(25:04):
moving in abolitionist or women's rights circles. And it almost
certainly inspired France's Gage to put together her recollections of
sojournals acron ohio speech from twelve years before. So this
title that we know the speech by today, which is
an't iole woman, comes from a line that's repeated several
times engages a version, including in this passage that man
(25:26):
over dar say that woman needs 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 aren't
ile woman? Look at me? Look at my arm. I
have plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no
(25:47):
man could head me. And aren't ile woman? I could
work as much and need as much as a man
when I could get it. I bear to lash as well,
And aren't ile woman? I have borne thirteen children and
seen a most all sold off into slavery, And when
I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard,
And aren't I a woman? This version of this speech
was reprinted in the eighteen seventy five edition of Sojourn
(26:11):
or Truce Autobiography, and in the book History of Woman's
Suffrage by Elizabeth Katie Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda
Joslyn Gage in eighteen eighty one, and all of that
has led to it being so widespread today. But the
oldest known written account of the akron Ohio speech is
not from eighteen sixty three, which was twelve years after
(26:32):
it happened. It's from the June twenty one, eighteen fifty
one issue of the Anti Slavery Bugle and it includes
some really similar sentiments to that more well known version.
Here is a quote quote, I am a woman's rights.
I have as much muscle as any man, and can
do as much work as any man. I have plowed
and reaped, and husked and chopped and mode, and can
(26:55):
any man do more than that? I have heard much
about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much
as any man, and can eat as much too, if
I can get it. I am as strong as any man.
That is now. This version also includes a line that
appears almost word for word in the other version, as
well as for intellect, all I can say is if
(27:15):
women have a point and a man a court, why
can't she have her little pointfull? Both versions also include
the point that Jesus was born from God and a woman,
and that man had no part in it. What the
eighteen fifty one version doesn't include is aren't iowaman or
ain't io woman, which is repeated in France's Gauge's version
(27:36):
four times, so there are questions about whether so during
Our Truth really said that part at all. It's also
very similar to am I not a woman and a sister?
Which was taken from an engraving and abolitionist George burns
eighteen thirty seven book Slavery illustrated in its effects upon women.
By the eighteen fifties, am I not a woman and
(27:56):
a sister was a slogan in the movement for abolition
and and all. This has led to a lot of
debate about exactly what Sojournal Truth said in eighteen fifty
one and just how much Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frances
Gauge crafted their depictions of her around their own preconceptions
rather than around anything she actually said or did. It
(28:18):
is clear that both Stowe and Gauge portrayed Truths in
a way that made her seem like an uneducated and
even an intelligent Southern enslaved person when she was really
a native Dutch speaker who spoke at least two languages
and also had a very keen intellect. And they both
did so to capitalize on prior work. Harriet Beecher Stowe
was building on the popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and
(28:40):
Frances Gauge was building on the popularity of Stowe's essay
in the Atlantic. Uncle Tom's Cabin had also influenced so
Journal Truth's own speeches because after that book came out, people,
especially when they were hearing abolitionist lectures, were a lot
more interested in hearing her stories from her enslavement rather
than hearing about anything else she might want to talk about.
(29:02):
But it's not accurate to suggest that the most famous
version of eight ile woman was made up out of
whole cloth, as some viral posts on the internet might suggest.
In multiple other speeches, Sojourner Truth made the point that
women were expected to receive gracious and genteel treatment, but
she was not, even though she was a woman. And
(29:23):
there's definite overlap between the eighteen fifty one and eighteen
sixty three versions of the speeches. But as we've said,
the eighteen sixties three version is written in this heavy
Southern inspired dialect, even though she did not speak like
that at all, although she did, as we also mentioned,
have a casual folksiness to her speech. Yeah, a lot
of the other people who noted her speeches and published
(29:46):
them somewhere and like ablissness, newspapers and that kind of
thing a lot of time have like some some apostrophes
that drop letters off of the end of words, or
some non standard uses of verb, agreement, or something like that,
but not remotely the like almost impossible to read versions
of Frances Gage and Harry Beatrice do. So it's like
(30:07):
it's it's clear that there was sort of a rhythm
and a quaintness about her speech, but it doesn't seem
like it was the way those two women tried to
reproduce it. Also, because sojourn or Truth didn't read or write,
really everything we know about her and her speeches is
filtered through other people, and almost all of the other
(30:28):
people who have written down that things that she said
were white. Ultimately, she had a lot more control over
her image than she had over her words. She sat
for photographs several times later in her life, after photography
became a more common thing for people to do. She
very carefully chose her clothing and her posture and the
(30:49):
other objects in these photos. Her appearance in them is
always very tidy and very reserved. She's often wearing a
shawl or holding some knitting, and these pictures suggest still
a lot of things. They suggest simplicity and domesticity, but
also refinement and productivity and self reliance. A lot of
the photographs are printed with the caption I sell the
(31:11):
shadow to support the substance, and that was the slogan
that she used to describe why she was selling both
her picture and the story. Also, I'm not totally sure
how to wrap up this whole conversation, but it does
really really remind me of Chief Seattle's speech that he
never made, which we just put out there in a
(31:32):
Saturday Classic in advanced of this episode, because the like,
the one thing that a lot of people know about
Chief Seattle besides the city of Seattle was named after him,
was that he supposedly made this speech in eighteen fifty
four that was like super environmental in its themes, and
so they have this image of like Chief Seattle as
this uh like native person who personified um environmental awareness.
(31:58):
But really that version that is so i'dely quoted in
environmental context is by a guy named Ted Perry, and
it was written in the nineteen seventies, so like it's
I they're I feel like there are a lot of
parallels between Sojourner Truth and Chief Seattle in that way,
both in how their words were used in a way
that they doesn't necessarily reflect them at all, and the
(32:18):
fact that like that one use of language has become
the thing that people associate with them. I will just
say that I love photographs of Sojourner Truth, particularly when
she has her little narrow wire frame glasses on. Yeah. Yeah,
she just looks like a woman one. She looks smart,
like there is a light in her eyes. It's like,
(32:40):
I know exactly what you're about. But to to um,
there's something very sweet looking about her at the same time, Yeah,
and I think it's the glasses. I admittedly like, I
love a pair of glasses, so it automatically endears me
to people. But I really really love those photographs of
her where she's sitting with her glasses and she kind
of looks like I'm not have and you're not, um, haven't.
(33:04):
I read a quote about her somewhere along the way
in doing the research for this, and then I couldn't
track down the origin of it, but it was a
description that was something like she had a heart of
gold and a tongue of fire, and I was like, yeah,
that makes sense. And I also I think that an
i Ale woman's speech has obviously meant a lot to
a lot of people, So the fact that it has
(33:25):
this complicated history to me doesn't mean that it's suddenly
like not worthwhile to read or listen to you or
or some of the really amazing renditions of it that
you can see on the internet, Like, I feel like
those still have a lot of meaning even though there's
all there all these questions about them. Yeah, I mean,
the sentiment of it is valuable to consider, but as
(33:47):
we discussed at length in this episode, the way it's
been presented has been a little bit dicey at times,
and and it's worthy of examination without necessarily robbing that
idea of the questions that should be asked that are
associated with it from their own own imports. Yeah, it does.
It does sadden me that because that's the one thing
(34:10):
that people know about her, that there's so much more
about her life that is just not as widely known
at all. Yeah, what you got in the way a
listener mail this time around? I have some listener mail
about Francisco Franco from Abe. Abe says, Hey, Holly and Tracy,
I really enjoyed hearing your podcast about the rise and
(34:30):
regime of Francisco Franco in Spain. I learned a lot
of great information about a regime that very often gets
omitted from American history classes, probably because the US supported
the regime due to its anti communist stance in the
Cold War. I have one correction though. At one point
you mentioned that Spain was the last fascist regime in
Europe following the fall of Italy and Germany in World
(34:51):
War Two. However, this is not actually true. Portugal was
also ruled by the fascist Estado Novo New State in
Portuguese Party until nineteen seventy four. To be clear, I'm
no means an expert on this topic, but from the
little I know about the regime, it was exceptionally similar
to Franco's both in ideology and historical era. Estado Novo
(35:11):
came to power in nineteen thirty three while Franco was
engaged in the Spanish Civil War. They believed in their
supremacy over their remaining colonies, most notably Angola, Mozambique, and Macau.
As much as Spain acted with regards to Morocco. As
you mentioned, they were also staunchly anti communist, pro Catholic,
and socially conservative. A big difference from what you mentioned, though,
(35:33):
was Franco's later economic success in the nineteen sixties that
makes him a controversial figure in Spain because some look
fondly upon him for this. As you mentioned in the episode,
this did not happen in Portugal, as by the end
of the regime they were the poorest country in Western Europe.
In addition, they did not have the same support from
capitalist countries, particularly the United States, because of their views
(35:55):
on decolonization, which were at odds with the rest of
the historical empires of Britain, France, et cetera. Anyways, I
love the episode as it touched on a really overlooked
but very important part of European history. Thanks for everything
you do, Abe. Thank you very much Abe for writing
this letter. So I wanted to note that what we
had said was that other nations considered Francisco Franco to
(36:19):
be the last surviving fascist dictator at the time. Like
that was how other world powers, especially like other world
powers that had been allies in the war, like that
was how they were looking back on him um and
they didn't seem to have that same perception of Portugal,
(36:39):
largely because while Spain was technically neutral in World War Two,
it's still clearly leaned towards the Access Powers. And while
Portugal was also neutral, during World War Two, Portugal leaned
toward more of the Allied Powers UM and then came
(37:00):
more formally aligned with Britain later on in the war,
and so the other World powers didn't have the same
regard for Portugal that they had for Spain and Francisco
Franco after the war in terms of other leaders referring
to him as the last surviving fascist dictator. So to
clarify all that, thank you again, Abe for writing this
(37:23):
email to us. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast or history podcasts
at how stuff works dot com. And then we're all
over social media at miss in History and that is
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can also subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google
podcast wherever else find podcasts. For more on this and
(37:50):
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. We are
picking up where we left off last time in the
story of Sojourner Truth. Last time we talked about her
(00:23):
enslavement in the Hudson River Valley in New York and
how a religious vision after she was free led to
her moving to New York City. Today we are picking
up with another vision, which marked another huge shift in
how she lived her life. And since this is a
two parter, I really recommend listening to part one first.
We're gonna directly refer to it a few times, including
(00:43):
right out of the gate. So after the collapse of
Father Matthias's religious community the Kingdom, Isabelle has spent several
difficult years in New York City. She felt as though
everything she had tried to do in New York had failed,
and she felt like she herself had failed as well.
She wasn't generous enough, she wasn't kind enough. She felt
that she was too selfish and greedy. An example she
(01:06):
gave in her narrative was that a man where she
was living would give her a dollar to hire a
poor person to clear the walk, but she would clear
the walk herself and keep that money, reasoning that she
needed it because she was poor too. And in eighteen
forty three she began to see herself as quote unfeeling
selfish and wicked. On June one, eight forty three, she
(01:28):
had another religious experience in which she felt called to
completely change her life, to leave the city of New
York and to go east and preach, as had happened
and the experience that had led her to go to
New York earlier. This happened around Pentecost. She put a
few things into a pillow case. She told the woman
who ran the house where she was staying that she
(01:50):
was leaving, and she said that she had a new name.
That new name was so Journal. When asked why she
was going east, she said, quote, the spirit calls me there,
and I must go east. Really meant going across Long Island,
and along the way, she asked God what her last
name should be, and the name that came to her
was Truth, So Journal. Truth's time as an itinerant preacher
(02:12):
happened during the religious revival known as the Second Grade Awakening,
but more specifically, a man named William Miller had been
developing a huge following. His followers came to be known
as Miller Writes. In eighteen twenty two, based on a
series of complicated equations, he announced that he had determined
the day that Christ would return to Earth, at which
(02:33):
point the righteous would ascend to Heaven. When he had
made this announcement back in eighteen two, hadn't named a
specific date when this is going to happen, but some
of his followers had put forth the day of March
eighteen forty three. That date had already come and gone
when so Journal took her new name and started traveling east.
(02:53):
But Miller had said from the start that Christ could
come as late as eighteen forty four, so as so
Journal Truth was traveling along Long Island, the Millerites were
eagerly awaiting this event, which was now expected to happen
on March onety four. So Journer herself was not a Millerite,
and she didn't think Miller's predictions were accurate at all,
(03:15):
but the popularity of the movement really paved the way
for her preaching. Tent meetings were a big part of it,
and there were other women preachers at these meetings, including
other black women, so there were places that she could
preach with a congregation there to hear her. People were
also really ready for her style of preaching, which was
really dynamic and energetic and very well versed in scripture.
(03:39):
It was infused with the perfectionist ideas that people could
free themselves from sin through willpower and religion. It was
full of her own lived experiences and her own understanding
of God and of the Bible. She had a very informal,
kind of folksy way of speaking, and she had a
very striking appearance. Thanks to her height of nearly six
feet and her ay for smoking a pipe. Her reputation
(04:02):
started to really spread, and she started arriving at tent
meetings to find out that people were really hoping she
would be one of the people who was coming there
to preach. A series of predicted dates for the Millerites
return of Christ came and went. The last of those
dates was October twenty eighteen forty four, which became known
as the Great Disappointment. The Millerite movement fell apart after that,
(04:24):
but many of its members continued on with their religious work.
These included Ellen Harmon, who later married James White and
co founded the Seventh Day Inventist Church. So after the
Great Disappointment, Truth kept in touch with a lot of
the same people, moving through the Seventh day Adventist circles
the way that she had moved through the Millerites. By
that point, so jour in her Truth had moved to
(04:46):
Massachusetts and had joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry,
which was also called the Community. This was a utopian
community that was centered on a silk mill, and that
silk mill was communally operated by the commun unity members
as free labor. This was a somewhat unexpected place for
Truth to end up. Even though Massachusetts has a strong
(05:08):
connection to the movement for the abolition of slavery, Northampton
was really conservative. It was a popular vacation spot for
slave owners from the South, and racism was prolific in
the area surrounding the community. It was also kind of
unexpected considering what had happened the last time. So journal
Truth joined a communal living situation, which we talked about
(05:29):
in Part one. But the Northampton Association of Education and
Industry was so much different from Father Matthias's Kingdom. The
community was home to reformers and radicals that had been
founded by ten families who believed in the abolition of
slavery and the granting of full citizenship rights to free
black people. Although there were some religious elements to all this,
(05:52):
in general, the community was really about trying to abolish
slavery and inequality, not about proselytizing. The community also had
more liberal views on gender. Everyone in the community was
allowed to choose what work to do, with the exception
of preparing mulberry leaves, which was necessary for everyone to
help with, and this meant that women were not just
(06:12):
put into domestic roles by default. We've talked about several
utopian communities on previous episodes, and one of the difficulties
that we have talked about, and several of them, is
members of the community not really pulling their own weight
in terms of keeping the whole thing running. People a
lot of times joined utopian communities with kind of an
idealistic idea of of how that's going to go, and
(06:35):
it really turns out to involve a lot of incredibly
hard work that people aren't necessarily ready for at the community.
So journal truth, worked incredibly hard, and she was also
one of the people who kept everyone else in line
when it came to doing their share of the work.
She held everyone else to extremely high standards, but she
held herself to those same standards as well. Two of
(06:56):
Sojourner's daughters, Elizabeth and Sophia, joined her at the community
in eighteen forty four, and this reunion was both joyous
and challenging. So Journer hadn't always been able to be
close to her daughters, both because of their enslavement and
because of her religious work in New York City, so
it was actually pretty difficult for the three of them
(07:16):
to try to build a close relationship now that the
girls were in their late teens. Plus, Sophia was pregnant
by a man that she had been living with, and
that carried a lot of emotional baggage for so Journer.
There were questions surrounding some of Sojourner's own pregnancies, and
these were questions that she mostly avoided now that she
was living as a preacher. But aside from that, she
(07:37):
regretted not being able to be more present in her
daughter's lives to possibly bring them to a different outcome
than the one that she had had herself. While living
at the community, so Journer began meeting and developing connections
with prominent figures in the movements for abolition and women's rights.
This included William Lloyd, Garrison's brother in law, George Benson,
(07:58):
and in eighteen forty four, Rison himself. Connecticut abolitionists also
used the community as their headquarters. The American Anti Slavery
Society had split in eighteen forty because some of its
members found Garrison's beliefs to be too radical, and once
that happened, Garrison's supporters had no formal organization in Connecticut,
so they organized from the community instead. Just to note,
(08:21):
among Garrison's more radical beliefs that caused this split, where
that the United States Government should be totally rebuilt to
be anti slavery from its foundation, rather than trying to
add anti slavery reforms to the existing government. So Journer
also met Frederick Douglass at the community, and in his
What I Found at the Northampton Association he described her
(08:44):
this way, I met here for the first time, that
strange compound of wit and wisdom, of wild enthusiasm and
flint like common sense, who 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. I allude to sojourner truth. She
(09:04):
was a genuine specimen of the uncultured negro. She cared
little for elegance or refinement of manners. She seemed to
please herself and others best when she put her ideas
in the oddest forms. She was much respected at Florence,
for she was honest, industrious, and amiable. Her quaint speeches
easily gave her an audience, and she was one of
(09:26):
the most useful members of the community in its day
of small things. There's just so much going on in
that discreption. Well, and it's also I have always enjoyed
his writing because even though this is pros, the cadence
of it feels very poetic to me, Like I just
like the way he assembles numbers of syllables together in
(09:47):
one sentence. It's very pleasing. Yeah, Florence was sort of
the place in Northampton where all of this was going on.
And it's clear from this that um Frederick Douglas in
some ways really respec acted her and in some ways
didn't really and also that she did not necessarily have
(10:07):
a lot of patients for Frederick Douglas. Sometimes I imagine
he really respected her but found her to be a
pain in the neck. Okay, that's the vibe I get
from this. Yeah. Yeah. It was also in Northampton, That's
so Journer Truth and all of Gilbert collaborated on Sojourner's autobiography,
and we will talk about that after a quick sponsor break.
(10:35):
While living in Northampton, so Journer Truth worked with all
of Gilbert to write her autobiography, and the result was
the narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Bondswoman of Olden Time,
first published in eighteen fifty. It was published along with
statements from white abolitionists attesting to so Journer's character into
the validity of the book. By that point, the community
(10:56):
itself had dissolved, but several of its members had remained
in Northampton. So Journer was introduced to Olives through a
mutual friend, probably Sarah Benson. Both Sarah and Sojourner were
taking the Water Cure at David Ruggles Hydrotherapy Center in Florence, Massachusetts,
which is part of Northampton Ruggles. Was one of the
abolitionists who helped Frederick Douglas escape from slavery, as well
(11:18):
as being the first black bookseller in the United States.
He died in eighteen forty nine, which was a huge
blow to the abolitionist movement and to Sojourner Truth personally.
Olive and so Journer worked together on the autobiography because
so Journer hadn't learned to read or write. A very
few copies of her signature that exists today really resemble
(11:39):
a child's earliest attempts to write their names, and there's
been a lot of speculation about why this is. It
was not common at all for enslaved people in New
York to be taught to read or write, But by
the late eighteen forties, when she was working on this book,
so Journer had been free for about fifteen years, and
she had also been surrounded by educated, affluent people, especially
(12:00):
during her time at the Northampton community. It's really likely
that several of these people would have encouraged her to
learn to read or offered to teach her themselves. So
there are a lot of hypotheses for why Sojourner didn't
learn to read after becoming free, and one is that
she may have had a learning disability, a visual perception disorder,
or a psychological block brought on by being sold to
(12:23):
an English speaking home when she spoke only Dutch and
then beaten for not understanding the language that she did
not know. It is also possible that she didn't trust
the act of writing, or that she feared that if
she learned to write, it would weigh down her mind
or crowd out the voice of the Holy Spirit in
her head. Also, this is really a question that is
a lot more common today than it was when she
(12:46):
was living, because it was really common for people not
to know how to read or write, especially people of color,
regardless of whether they've ever been enslaved, and especially women
regardless of their race. Whatever the reason, when sojourn Or
started collaborating with all of Gilbert, she did not know
how to read or write, And the book they created
together is written in the third person, so it reads
(13:08):
more like Olive's observation of what Sojourner told her about
her life, rather than Sojourner's own words directly from her
own mouth. Even so, we don't have really a lot
of reason to doubt the book that they ultimately made together,
and Sojourner stood by it for the rest of her
life and directed people to it when they had questions.
It is also the only narrative we have of an
(13:29):
enslaved person in Dutch New York. It's it's really likely
that that all of influenced things about it, But for
so journous whole life. People would ask her questions and
she'd be like, it's all in the book. So she
she clearly supported it. One of the things that so
journal Truth did with this autobiography was to sell copies
(13:50):
to fund her own needs, her own living, and her
own lecture tours, and she toured extensively. By the eighteen forties,
she was active on a lecture sir It and her
height and her commanding voice and her keen intelligence made
her stand out. She was the first woman to really
come to prominence as a speaker in the abolitionist movement
(14:10):
in the United States. In the eighteen fifties, so journal
embarked on a twenty two state lecture tour. Her speeches
ranged through abolition, women's rights, religion, and the political issues
of the day. This included stridently denouncing the Compromise of
eighteen fifty, which was meant to appease the slave states
after California applied to join the Union as a free
(14:31):
state in eighteen forty nine without a corresponding slave state.
To preserve what was considered the balance. Among other things,
the Compromise of eighteen fifty amended the Fugitive Slave Act.
This eighteen fifty revision to the Act required the United
States government to help slave owners recapture escaped slaves, including
(14:52):
the right to pursue escaped slaves into free territory. There
were also penalties for sheltering or helping escaped slaves, and
every person of African descent was really at risk for
being captured and sold into slavery. This bill was nicknamed
the Bloodhound Bill by its opponents because it was basically like,
(15:13):
We're gonna hire a bunch of bloodhounds to track down
all the escaped people. On October twenty three, and eighteen fifty,
so Journer attended the first National Women's Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts,
and there she gave one of many speeches that connected
the cause of abolition to the cause of women's rights,
and afterward the convention resolved to include quote the trampled
(15:36):
women of the plantation in their advocacy. We have talked
about which of them followed through on that in other
episodes of the show. It's definitely not something where they
had this meeting in Worcester and then immediately all got
on board with the cause of abolition and black women's rights.
In eighteen fifty one, so Journer attended another women's rights
conference in Akron, Ohio, and it was at this one
(15:58):
that she gave her speech that's us known today as
eight iole Woman. Sometimes it's also presented as Aren't Ile Woman,
And we're going to be talking about the speech a
lot more a little bit later in the show, but
this is where it happened in the timeline. Over the
eighteen fifties, so Journer became increasingly well known for her speaking,
which was often at least partly extemporaneous. At least once,
(16:19):
she amused audiences by saying something along the lines of
I have come here out of curiosity to hear what
I have to say. I would love that. She was
also very direct, and she did not back down from
challenging other people. In eighteen fifty two, she was listening
to Frederick Douglas give a speech in Salem, Ohio, in
(16:40):
the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty
He had become more militant, saying, quote, the way to
make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter was to
make a few slave hunters dead men. As he started
calling for enslaved people to rise up by force, so Journer,
who was really not in favor of violence and all this,
called out, Frederick is God Gone? Sometimes this is described
(17:04):
as having happened much later at Faniel Hall in Boston,
with the question being Frederick is God dead? Either way,
she was basically asking Frederick Douglas in public whether he
had lost his faith after the dread Scott decision. In
eighteen fifty seven, she began speaking about the Constitution as
infested with weevils, drawing comparison to a wheat weevil infestation
(17:26):
that had been devastating crops. That same year, she sold
her property in Northampton and bought a small home in
Battle Creek, Michigan, where she became active in the area's
spiritualist community. She was into a lot of trendy practices
of the day, including spiritualism, phrenology, and hydrotherapy. Yeah, we
didn't really mention it earlier, but her book sales and
(17:46):
other work was like it funded things like buying a
house of her own, that kind of stuff. So Journer
also became really known for bucking gender norms in a
very visible way, beyond just her habit of smoking a
pipe in public, and she also got a reputation for
being pretty defiant. The Boston Liberator wrote about one incident
that happened in Indiana in eighteen fifty eight in which
(18:09):
the men in the audience questioned whether she was really
a man in disguise. Here is what they said. Quote.
So Journer told them that her breasts had suckled many
a white babe, to the exclusion of her own offspring,
that some of those white babies had grown to man's estate,
that although they had sucked her colored breasts, they were,
(18:30):
in her estimation, far more manly than they her prosecutors
appeared to be, and she quietly asked them, as she
disrobed her bosom, if they too wished to suck. In
vindication of her truthfulness, she told them she would show
her breast to the whole congregation, that it was not
to her shame that she uncovered her breast before them,
(18:51):
but to their shame. The US Civil War began in
eighteen sixty one, and by that point so Journer was
struggling with her health. She had spent about twenty years
traveling and speaking out against slavery and in favor of
women's rights in the last decade or so, had been
through increasingly dangerous territory as conditions became more violent in
advance of the war. Although her health started to improve
(19:14):
in eighteen sixty three, she just didn't have the kind
of stamina that had been necessary for her long ranging
speaking tours in the eighteen fifties. During the Civil War,
so Journal helped recruit troops to fight for the Union
and encouraged the Union to add the abolition of slavery
to its objectives for the war. In eighteen sixty four,
she met President Abraham Lincoln, and after the war she
(19:35):
moved to Washington, d c. And then to the Freedman's
village in Arlington to try to work with the freed
people and help them adjust to life outside of slavery.
This included teaching the sorts of homemaking skills that people
who had been working in the fields their whole lives
hadn't really had an opportunity to learn. She also helped
care for hospital patients in the years after the war.
In eighteen sixty five, she was supposed to attend a
(19:57):
reception in advance of Lincoln's second and faguration, but she
was turned away on account of her race. Her escort,
Captain George Cars, answered, if she is not good enough
to enter, then I am not. Lincoln later apologized for
that having happened. After the Civil War, Sojourner continued fighting
for civil rights, both through her speaking and through her actions.
(20:20):
She advocated adding women's rights to the Reconstruction Amendments. As
cities started formally segregating by race, she started intentionally boarding
segregated street cars, sometimes staying on board longer than she
needed to just to press the issue. At one point,
this led to a conductor dislocating her shoulder when he
forcibly removed her from the car. She got him fired,
(20:43):
and he was arrested on charges of assault and battery.
She also filed suit against the street car conductor who
tried to keep her from boarding. Life became increasingly difficult
in Washington, d c. As the influx of freed people
sparked a backlash among white residents. Sojourner had been trying
to get freed people jobs in Washington, but she gradually
(21:04):
began relocating people to other cities instead, particularly Rochester, New York.
Eventually she moved back to Battle Creek, Michigan. She renewed
her focus on women's rights, especially black women's rights, along
with helping the poor. In the late eighteen seventies, she
began working on a plan to resettle freed people to
homesteads in the West, although that never came to fruition.
(21:26):
She gave her last public lecture in eighteen eighty one.
By that point, she had met three US presidents and
had spent decades publicly preaching and publicly advocating for abolition,
women's rights, and civil rights. Even so, she had had
to make a habit of carrying a scrap book full
of newspaper clippings about herself and signatures of prominent white
(21:48):
abolitionists and women's rights activists, because otherwise people who hadn't
already heard of her didn't really take her seriously because
of her race. In the last few years of her life,
Sojourner Truth is cared for by her daughters and by
her doctor, John Harvey Kellogg. She died on November three,
at the age of about eighty six, possibly due to
(22:10):
complications of diabetes or gang green. Her last known words
were be a follower of Jesus. But the words that
people are a lot more familiar with from sojourn or
Truth are ain't ile woman. And we will finally get
to that part after one last sponsor break. So, like
(22:34):
we said earlier in the show, So journal Truth gave
the speech that is known today as ain't ile Woman
an akron Ohio in eighteen fifty one, and the most
well known version of this speech was published by Francis
Gage in the New York Independent on April eighteen sixty three.
Earlier that month, Harriet Beecher Stowe had published a story
(22:56):
in the Atlantic called Sojourner Truth the Libyans Sybil, and
this was one year after she published her anti slavery
novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. In the Atlantic article, Stow recounts
meeting Truth quote many years ago, and she relates being
introduced after which Truth says, well, Honey, de lord bless you.
(23:16):
I just thought I'd like to come and have a
look at you use here to me. I reckon. Stowe's
account goes on to portray so Journal Truth as a
very stereotypically Southern slave, with her speech rendered in a
really thick dialect, so thick. I don't know about you, Holly,
I'm not comfortable reading it out loud. Just reading the
part that I just read felt weird and gross, um,
(23:38):
and also a little bit funny to me because, as
we have mentioned, she was not from the South right,
so it makes it super weird and gross. Yeah. Well,
and so we said in the top of part one
that there are a lot of videos on YouTube of
black women performing this speech, and I am not criticizing
any of that at all. I'm saying that, like, the
(23:59):
speech has written in such a thickly dialected way that
for a white woman to try to recreate it feels bad.
In addition to this really really thickly uh presented language,
so also makes a whole bunch of factual errors in
(24:20):
this article, including saying that so journal Truth had been
brought to the United States from Africa, which she was
not she was born in Dutch New York, and also
saying that so journal Truth was as of eighteen sixty
three when the article came out dead, which she was not.
So journal Truth knew about the speech, she was not
(24:41):
fond of it. She pointed out how many elements of
it were wrong, including saying that she did not call
people honey and that she did not refer to people
of her race using the N word, which is from
a part of the article we did not read. The
Atlantic was widely circulated in eighteen sixty three, So this
article is what introduced so journ Truth to a lot
of the United States, especially people who were not already
(25:04):
moving in abolitionist or women's rights circles. And it almost
certainly inspired France's Gage to put together her recollections of
sojournals acron ohio speech from twelve years before. So this
title that we know the speech by today, which is
an't iole woman, comes from a line that's repeated several
times engages a version, including in this passage that man
(25:26):
over dar say that woman needs 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 aren't
ile woman? Look at me? Look at my arm. I
have plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no
(25:47):
man could head me. And aren't ile woman? I could
work as much and need as much as a man
when I could get it. I bear to lash as well,
And aren't ile woman? I have borne thirteen children and
seen a most all sold off into slavery, And when
I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard,
And aren't I a woman? This version of this speech
was reprinted in the eighteen seventy five edition of Sojourn
(26:11):
or Truce Autobiography, and in the book History of Woman's
Suffrage by Elizabeth Katie Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda
Joslyn Gage in eighteen eighty one, and all of that
has led to it being so widespread today. But the
oldest known written account of the akron Ohio speech is
not from eighteen sixty three, which was twelve years after
(26:32):
it happened. It's from the June twenty one, eighteen fifty
one issue of the Anti Slavery Bugle and it includes
some really similar sentiments to that more well known version.
Here is a quote quote, I am a woman's rights.
I have as much muscle as any man, and can
do as much work as any man. I have plowed
and reaped, and husked and chopped and mode, and can
(26:55):
any man do more than that? I have heard much
about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much
as any man, and can eat as much too, if
I can get it. I am as strong as any man.
That is now. This version also includes a line that
appears almost word for word in the other version, as
well as for intellect, all I can say is if
(27:15):
women have a point and a man a court, why
can't she have her little pointfull? Both versions also include
the point that Jesus was born from God and a woman,
and that man had no part in it. What the
eighteen fifty one version doesn't include is aren't iowaman or
ain't io woman, which is repeated in France's Gauge's version
(27:36):
four times, so there are questions about whether so during
Our Truth really said that part at all. It's also
very similar to am I not a woman and a sister?
Which was taken from an engraving and abolitionist George burns
eighteen thirty seven book Slavery illustrated in its effects upon women.
By the eighteen fifties, am I not a woman and
(27:56):
a sister was a slogan in the movement for abolition
and and all. This has led to a lot of
debate about exactly what Sojournal Truth said in eighteen fifty
one and just how much Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frances
Gauge crafted their depictions of her around their own preconceptions
rather than around anything she actually said or did. It
(28:18):
is clear that both Stowe and Gauge portrayed Truths in
a way that made her seem like an uneducated and
even an intelligent Southern enslaved person when she was really
a native Dutch speaker who spoke at least two languages
and also had a very keen intellect. And they both
did so to capitalize on prior work. Harriet Beecher Stowe
was building on the popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and
(28:40):
Frances Gauge was building on the popularity of Stowe's essay
in the Atlantic. Uncle Tom's Cabin had also influenced so
Journal Truth's own speeches because after that book came out, people,
especially when they were hearing abolitionist lectures, were a lot
more interested in hearing her stories from her enslavement rather
than hearing about anything else she might want to talk about.
(29:02):
But it's not accurate to suggest that the most famous
version of eight ile woman was made up out of
whole cloth, as some viral posts on the internet might suggest.
In multiple other speeches, Sojourner Truth made the point that
women were expected to receive gracious and genteel treatment, but
she was not, even though she was a woman. And
(29:23):
there's definite overlap between the eighteen fifty one and eighteen
sixty three versions of the speeches. But as we've said,
the eighteen sixties three version is written in this heavy
Southern inspired dialect, even though she did not speak like
that at all, although she did, as we also mentioned,
have a casual folksiness to her speech. Yeah, a lot
of the other people who noted her speeches and published
(29:46):
them somewhere and like ablissness, newspapers and that kind of
thing a lot of time have like some some apostrophes
that drop letters off of the end of words, or
some non standard uses of verb, agreement, or something like that,
but not remotely the like almost impossible to read versions
of Frances Gage and Harry Beatrice do. So it's like
(30:07):
it's it's clear that there was sort of a rhythm
and a quaintness about her speech, but it doesn't seem
like it was the way those two women tried to
reproduce it. Also, because sojourn or Truth didn't read or write,
really everything we know about her and her speeches is
filtered through other people, and almost all of the other
(30:28):
people who have written down that things that she said
were white. Ultimately, she had a lot more control over
her image than she had over her words. She sat
for photographs several times later in her life, after photography
became a more common thing for people to do. She
very carefully chose her clothing and her posture and the
(30:49):
other objects in these photos. Her appearance in them is
always very tidy and very reserved. She's often wearing a
shawl or holding some knitting, and these pictures suggest still
a lot of things. They suggest simplicity and domesticity, but
also refinement and productivity and self reliance. A lot of
the photographs are printed with the caption I sell the
(31:11):
shadow to support the substance, and that was the slogan
that she used to describe why she was selling both
her picture and the story. Also, I'm not totally sure
how to wrap up this whole conversation, but it does
really really remind me of Chief Seattle's speech that he
never made, which we just put out there in a
(31:32):
Saturday Classic in advanced of this episode, because the like,
the one thing that a lot of people know about
Chief Seattle besides the city of Seattle was named after him,
was that he supposedly made this speech in eighteen fifty
four that was like super environmental in its themes, and
so they have this image of like Chief Seattle as
this uh like native person who personified um environmental awareness.
(31:58):
But really that version that is so i'dely quoted in
environmental context is by a guy named Ted Perry, and
it was written in the nineteen seventies, so like it's
I they're I feel like there are a lot of
parallels between Sojourner Truth and Chief Seattle in that way,
both in how their words were used in a way
that they doesn't necessarily reflect them at all, and the
(32:18):
fact that like that one use of language has become
the thing that people associate with them. I will just
say that I love photographs of Sojourner Truth, particularly when
she has her little narrow wire frame glasses on. Yeah. Yeah,
she just looks like a woman one. She looks smart,
like there is a light in her eyes. It's like,
(32:40):
I know exactly what you're about. But to to um,
there's something very sweet looking about her at the same time, Yeah,
and I think it's the glasses. I admittedly like, I
love a pair of glasses, so it automatically endears me
to people. But I really really love those photographs of
her where she's sitting with her glasses and she kind
of looks like I'm not have and you're not, um, haven't.
(33:04):
I read a quote about her somewhere along the way
in doing the research for this, and then I couldn't
track down the origin of it, but it was a
description that was something like she had a heart of
gold and a tongue of fire, and I was like, yeah,
that makes sense. And I also I think that an
i Ale woman's speech has obviously meant a lot to
a lot of people, So the fact that it has
(33:25):
this complicated history to me doesn't mean that it's suddenly
like not worthwhile to read or listen to you or
or some of the really amazing renditions of it that
you can see on the internet, Like, I feel like
those still have a lot of meaning even though there's
all there all these questions about them. Yeah, I mean,
the sentiment of it is valuable to consider, but as
(33:47):
we discussed at length in this episode, the way it's
been presented has been a little bit dicey at times,
and and it's worthy of examination without necessarily robbing that
idea of the questions that should be asked that are
associated with it from their own own imports. Yeah, it does.
It does sadden me that because that's the one thing
(34:10):
that people know about her, that there's so much more
about her life that is just not as widely known
at all. Yeah, what you got in the way a
listener mail this time around? I have some listener mail
about Francisco Franco from Abe. Abe says, Hey, Holly and Tracy,
I really enjoyed hearing your podcast about the rise and
(34:30):
regime of Francisco Franco in Spain. I learned a lot
of great information about a regime that very often gets
omitted from American history classes, probably because the US supported
the regime due to its anti communist stance in the
Cold War. I have one correction though. At one point
you mentioned that Spain was the last fascist regime in
Europe following the fall of Italy and Germany in World
(34:51):
War Two. However, this is not actually true. Portugal was
also ruled by the fascist Estado Novo New State in
Portuguese Party until nineteen seventy four. To be clear, I'm
no means an expert on this topic, but from the
little I know about the regime, it was exceptionally similar
to Franco's both in ideology and historical era. Estado Novo
(35:11):
came to power in nineteen thirty three while Franco was
engaged in the Spanish Civil War. They believed in their
supremacy over their remaining colonies, most notably Angola, Mozambique, and Macau.
As much as Spain acted with regards to Morocco. As
you mentioned, they were also staunchly anti communist, pro Catholic,
and socially conservative. A big difference from what you mentioned, though,
(35:33):
was Franco's later economic success in the nineteen sixties that
makes him a controversial figure in Spain because some look
fondly upon him for this. As you mentioned in the episode,
this did not happen in Portugal, as by the end
of the regime they were the poorest country in Western Europe.
In addition, they did not have the same support from
capitalist countries, particularly the United States, because of their views
(35:55):
on decolonization, which were at odds with the rest of
the historical empires of Britain, France, et cetera. Anyways, I
love the episode as it touched on a really overlooked
but very important part of European history. Thanks for everything
you do, Abe. Thank you very much Abe for writing
this letter. So I wanted to note that what we
had said was that other nations considered Francisco Franco to
(36:19):
be the last surviving fascist dictator at the time. Like
that was how other world powers, especially like other world
powers that had been allies in the war, like that
was how they were looking back on him um and
they didn't seem to have that same perception of Portugal,
(36:39):
largely because while Spain was technically neutral in World War Two,
it's still clearly leaned towards the Access Powers. And while
Portugal was also neutral, during World War Two, Portugal leaned
toward more of the Allied Powers UM and then came
(37:00):
more formally aligned with Britain later on in the war,
and so the other World powers didn't have the same
regard for Portugal that they had for Spain and Francisco
Franco after the war in terms of other leaders referring
to him as the last surviving fascist dictator. So to
clarify all that, thank you again, Abe for writing this
(37:23):
email to us. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast or history podcasts
at how stuff works dot com. And then we're all
over social media at miss in History and that is
where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter. You
can also subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google
podcast wherever else find podcasts. For more on this and
(37:50):
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.
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Tracy Wilson
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