Column: Women as Reason
November 1998

Sojourner Truth's feminist legacy

by Jennifer Pen

Sojourner Truth's life, legacy and mind have been central to the Women's Liberation movements of her century and ours. Her bold renaming of herself, her challenges to white and male authority, and her break with Frederick Douglass over women's rights after the Civil War, were highlighted by Raya Dunayevskaya as exemplifying "the vanguard element of the Black dimension" and "Woman as revolutionary force and Reason" (WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND THE DIALECTICS OF WOMEN'S LIBERATION [WLDR] 49).

However, the meaning of Sojourner Truth's life is currently being contested in the academic and feminist worlds. These current debates have been prompted by Nell Painter's full-length biography, SOJOURNER TRUTH: A LIFE, A SYMBOL (Norton, 1996). Painter contends that the received image of Sojourner Truth is a myth, constructed from the writings of 19th century white feminists (and continued by their 20th century inheritors). Instead of amplifying Truth's own voice, Painter mutes it by claiming that it is essentially unrecoverable.

Painter is concerned by what she sees as Truth's malleability into a symbol for everyone's agenda. She maintains that white feminists use a "colossal Sojourner Truth...as an electrical presence who terminates debate" (Painter, 284-285).

Responding to such tokenism could lead readers into an appreciation of Sojourner Truth's intellect, but Painter goes in the opposite direction: She often dismisses her subject's thought. In contrast, Raya Dunayevskaya sees in Sojourner Truth a new kind of person, a new kind of subjectivity, born in relation to the Abolitionist and Women's Liberationist movements. Such "an original character...instead of being simply 'one in a million,' combines yesterday, today and tomorrow in such a manner that the new age suddenly experiences a 'shock of recognition,' whether that related to a new lifestyle or the great need for revolution here and now" (ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION [RLWLKM] 83).

Painter provides a wealth of new details of Truth's life and gives a sense of the scope of her activities. However, Painter reduces this life to trivialities. Thus, her adoption of the name "Sojourner Truth" is described as solely religious, to the utter banishment of the political moment. Painter trivializes her subject's need to sojourn as a psychological disappointment in not being a home owner.

How do we hear the meaning of "Sojourner Truth"? What Dunayevskaya caught from Truth's name and life was the "type of Reason that discloses that intelligence is related to one's experience and aspiration and is not merely a matter of literacy or illiteracy. It is the drive to freedom that determines one's philosophy and that makes one see what Marx meant by 'history and its process." (WLDR 54).

Painter misses that "drive to freedom" by focusing on the ways some white reformers found Truth to be entertaining. While Painter decries this racism, she does not offer us Truth's subjectivity or voice as a counterpoint.

Thus, Painter does not make much of Sojourner Truth's break from Douglass over the issue of votes for women, when she called him "short-minded" for sacrificing women's suffrage to the pragmatics of passing the 15th Amendment. Instead, Painter prefers to pit one Black woman-the powerful orator and poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper-against another, Sojourner Truth, on the basis of Truth's being favored by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (223-226). This is an inexplicable strategy which gives more power to white women intellectuals than to Truth's own powerful testimony, while dividing Black women.

When Painter reaches a topic she knows better than anyone-the "Exodusters" who left the South for Kansas in the 1870s and 1880s-she again misreads Truth's politics. Sojourner Truth had been trying to institute a plan to move freed Blacks from Washington, D.C. to Kansas immediately after the Civil War. Painter characterizes Truth's plan as paternalistic: "Freed people's initiative had no part in it" (236). But when "The Exodus to Kansas of 1879 upstaged Truth's plan," what happened? Sojourner Truth "supported it enthusiastically" (Painter 244). Painter misses the dialectic again, even if Truth caught it. Truth was trying to show her solidarity with the Black masses, at first creating-as intellectuals sometimes do-a false blueprint that couldn't work. But even though "the actual movement-an expression of independent black action-had caught her completely by surprise" (Painter 246), Truth knows to follow the dialectic of masses in motion! It is remarkable that an 80-year-old illiterate woman can respond to history in the making, while her biographer prefers to focus on Truth's shortcomings.

All people, and all historic figures, are beset by contradictions, but it is your revolutionary philosophy that dictates how you will lean when a crisis comes. In the absence of such a philosophy, history becomes merely a chronicle of events. Painter's biography brings us a wealth of new details, but they are like puzzle pieces unarranged, with some even maliciously tossed around the room. To fail to see that the Exodusters movement demonstrated the movement of the Idea of freedom, which was present in Truth's mind, too, is to read history as merely one-damn-thing-after-another. Like many intellectuals, Painter has succumbed to "the temptation to bring the bigger-than-life" thinker "down to their size" (RLWLKM 178).

Dunayevskaya always stressed how Truth's importance was grounded in history and in philosophy. Painter's book is an example of how "the attitude towards women's struggles seems always to play down women's actions as not meriting the description 'revolutionary'" (WLDR 80). But it also shows how "hard of hearing" intellectuals can be when it comes to learning the "new language of thought, Black thought" as enunciated by Sojourner Truth (WLDR 49). As Black feminist and lesbian Gloria Joseph said, to understand Sojourner Truth as "a thinker challenges all feminists, especially Black feminists, to set about the critical, historical contextualization of...her revolutionary intellect" ("Sojourner Truth: Archetypal Black Feminist" in WILD WOMEN IN THE WHIRLWIND, ed. Joanne M. Braxton and Andre Nicola McLaughlin).

CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO CONTENTS PAGE

CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO NEWS AND LETTERS