June 1, 1843: Isabella Baumfree renamed herself Sojourner Truth and left New York to launch her career as an activist. Formerly enslaved and without a formal education, she became a renowned public speaker, antislavery leader, and women’s rights advocate. She had been living in freedom since 1827, when she self-liberated by fleeing her enslaver with her infant child. Historian Deborah Gray White writes, “She, like most black women of the time, plowed, planted, and hoed, did as much work as a man, endured the brutal punishment meted out by slaveholders and their overseers, and also fulfilled her ordained role of motherhood. Judged by her life experience, all theories of inequality based on the assumption that women were weaker than men and that their physical and mental constitution suited them only for domestic duties were false. In fact, perhaps more than any group of American women, black women, particularly slaves, proved daily that sexual discrimination based on such assumptions was not justified.”
Citations: Sojourner Truth and Olive Gilbert, Narrative of Sojourner Truth (New York: Dover Publications, 1997 [1850]), 19, 58, https://archive.org/details/narrativeofsojo100gilb; Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999 [1985]), 14; “Sojourner Truth,” photomechanical print (location unknown, date unknown), https://www.loc.gov/item/rbcmiller001306/.
Comentários