A network of female support was clearly developing. Among the out-of-state women who sent letters of support to Akron were Amelia Bloomer and Elizabeth Cady Stanton of Seneca Falls, newspaper editor Clarina Howard Nichols of Vermont, and Nantucket Island native Lydia Folger Fowler, who became the second female graduate of a traditional medical school this same year. Dr. Fowler, a happily married woman without children, wrote Familiar Lessons on Physiology in 1847 to teach women about their bodies. During a lifelong Rochester career teaching obstetrics and gynecology, she set another precedent as the world’s first female medical school professor.
Unlike the Salem convention, men were allowed to participate at Akron and at future Ohio meetings to the regret of some women who said in their report that “the sons of Adam crowded our platform and often made it the scene of varied pugilistic efforts.” The convention also was the first with entertainment: a popular singing group, the Hutchinson Family Singers, was a big hit at reform assemblies for decades.
Sojourner Truth (Library of Congress)
Far and away the most important aspect of the Akron meeting, however, was the historic speech of Sojourner Truth. Born into slavery under the name Isabella in the late eighteenth century, she was owned by Dutch-speaking people who lived about 50 miles north of New York City. By her teenage years, she had been sold three times and was scarred from beatings she suffered when she did not understand orders in English.
In 1827, a year before New York implemented its gradual emancipation plan, she ran away to a Quaker family. They not only sheltered her, but even supported her in a legal battle: amazingly enough, her son Peter, who had been sold in violation of New York law, was returned from Alabama. Feeling “tall within,” she set out for New York City. She left the Society of Friends, she said, because “they would not let me sing,” and developed her own deeply personal faith: “God himself talks to me.”
After a disastrous time in a New York commune that ended up with her successfully fighting a murder charge, she took the name of Sojourner Truth in 1843 and set out to preach. In traveling through New England, she came to the attention of William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists. When she arrived in Akron in 1851, she recently had published her autobiography, which she dictated to a white woman, Olive Gilbert. Sales of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth would support her for the rest of her life, as she continued to move throughout the United States, living in Kansas during its tumultuous pre–Civil War years and finally settling in Battle Creek, Michigan.
Although she was listed as an attendee of the 1850 Worcester convention, the Massachusetts women who created its record for the History of Woman Suffrage did not see fit to discuss this black woman at any length in their convention report. Instead, it was Ohio’s “Aunt Fanny,” Frances Dana Gage, who detailed the appearance of Sojourner Truth at the Akron meeting:
The ladies of the movement trembled on seeing a tall, gaunt black woman in a gray dress and white turban, surmounted with an uncouth sun-bonnet, march deliberately into the church, walk with the air of a queen up the aisle, and take her seat upon the pulpit steps. A buzz of disapprobation was heard all over the house, and there fell on the listening ear, “An abolition affair!” “Woman’s rights and niggers!”….
At my request, order was restored, and the business of the Convention went on…. All through these sessions old Sojourner, quiet and reticent…sat crouched against the wall on the corner of the pulpit stairs…. At intermission she was busy selling the “Life of Sojourner Truth,” a narrative of her own strange and adventurous life. Again and again, timorous ones came to me and said, with earnestness, “Don’t let her speak, Mrs. Gage, it will ruin us. Every newspaper in the land will have our cause mixed up with abolition and niggers, and we shall be utterly denounced.” My only answer was, “We shall see when the time comes.”
The second day the work waxed warm. Methodist, Baptist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Universalist ministers came in to hear and discuss the resolutions presented. One claimed superior rights and privileges for man, on the ground of “superior intellect;” another, because of the “manhood of Christ”…. Another gave us a theological view of the “sin of our first mother.”
There were very few women in those days who dared to “speak in meeting;” and the august teachers of the people were seemingly getting the better of us, while the boys in the galleries, and the sneerers among the pews, were hugely enjoying the discomfiture, as they supposed, of the “strongminded.” Some of the tender-skinned friends were on the point of losing dignity, and the atmosphere betokened a storm. When, slowly from her seat in the corner rose Sojourner Truth, who, till now, had scarcely lifted her head. “Don’t let her speak!” gasped a half a dozen in my ear. She moved slowly and solemnly to the front, laid her old bonnet at her feet, and turned her great speaking eyes to me. There was a hissing sound of disapprobation above and below. I rose and announced “Sojourner Truth,” and begged the audience to keep silent for a few moments.
The tumult subsided at once, and every eye was fixed on this almost Amazon form, which stood nearly six feet high, head erect, and eyes piecing the upper air like one in a dream. At her first word there was a profound hush. She spoke in deep tones, which, though not loud, reached every ear in the house and away through the throng at the doors and windows. [In the following, Sojourner Truth’s speech has been freed of the nineteenth-century dialect style that Gage used in recording it. Gage’s occasional descriptive interjections into the body of the speech also have been eliminated.]
“Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that between the niggers of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?
That man over there say that women needs to be helped into carriages, 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 ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me. And ain’t I a woman?
Then they talk about this thing in the head; what’s this they call it? [‘Intellect’ someone whispers near.] That’s right, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or nigger’s rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, because Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Men had nothing to do with Him.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now that they are asking to do it, the men better let them! Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner has got nothing more to say.”
At Sojourner Truth’s rebuke of the minister who made the point about “intellect,” the audience’s “cheering was loud and long.” When she spoke to the story of Eve, “the first woman God ever made,” Gage said that “almost every sentence elicited deafening applause.” Sojourner Truth “returned to her corner, amid roars of applause, leaving more than one of us with streaming eyes, and hearts beating with gratitude. She had taken us up in her strong arms and carried us,” Gage averred. “I have never in my life seen anything like her magical influence.”
When the speech was over, “hundreds rushed up to shake hands with her,” and Sojourner Truth’s place as a celebrity suffragist was solidified. More than most men