Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol by Nell Irvin Painter

As an antislavery feminist, [Sojourner Truth] should, according to [Nell Irvin Painter], be best known for two incidents: her speech before the Ohio Woman's Rights Convention in 1851, where she told her audience, simply and directly, that women should have the rights due them, and that it would not take anything away from men for women to be given their due; and her actions at an antislavery meeting in Indiana, during which, when challenged as a sexual imposter, she bared her breast and asked her male attackers if they would like to suck, thereby infantilizing and unmanning them. Sojourner Truth, ingenious but illiterate, was not, however, able to maintain control of her own image. In the April 1863 Atlantic Monthly, Harriet Beecher Stowe published an article titled "Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl," which remakes Truth into a "primitive objet d'art and source of entertainment" (154). Stowe draws Truth as a "quaint and innocent exotic" who speaks in an outrageous "Negro dialect" (in response, Truth says, `I never make use of the word honey') and sings hymns "'with the strong barbaric accent of the native African'" (154, 156, 163). Further, she mistakenly claims that Truth was born in Africa, and that she is dead. When Frances Dana Gage read this account of Sojourner Truth, she responded with her own, which focused on the 1851 Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio that Gage chaired. Unhappy with Stowe's inventions, according to Painter, Gage invented "And Ar'n't I a Woman;" twelve years after the convention took place. Compared with the straightforward report by Marius Robinson written immediately after the convention and published in the Salem Anti-Slavery Bugle in 1851, Gage's account is four times as long and far more dramatic. Gage's Truth, unlike Robinson's, repeats the phrase "And ar'n't I a woman?". Further, Gage's Truth has borne and lost thirteen children, while the historical Sojourner Truth, to the best of anyone's knowledge, had only five. Finally, Gage's Truth uses the Bible less skillfully than Robinson's Truth -- or than we would expect from the pentecostal Sojourner Truth, whose "biblical allusions always fit her meaning," according to Painter (173). According to Painter, these accounts by Stowe and Gage, however inaccurate, nevertheless set the stage for the presentation of Sojourner Truth found in Elizabeth Cady: Stanton and Susan B. Anthony's History of Woman Suffrage, which in turn became the account that most influenced how the ima