America's Women

by Gail Collins

  “WHY CAN’T SHE HAVE HER LITTLE PINT FULL?”

  As the nineteenth century wore on, women took to the podium more and more frequently, and for young women reared in reform circles, lecturing began to seem like a perfectly feasible, and exciting, career. “See if Im not a speaker some day,” fifteen-year-old Ellen Wright wrote to a friend in 1855. “See if I dont rouse the people.” Audiences were particularly eager to hear about slavery from black people who they assumed had the inside story. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a member of a prominent free black family, was employed by the Maine Anti-Slavery Society as a traveling lecturer and attracted large audiences even though her experiences with slavery were almost as remote as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s. Male ex-slaves were common on the lecture trail, and Harriet Tubman made occasional speeches. But Sojourner Truth was the only female ex-slave who pursued a career as a public speaker. Perhaps she was the only American strong enough to overcome the combined insecurities that came with being a woman and being a slave.

  Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Van Wagenen, in New York’s Hudson Valley. She was sold for the first time when she was nine, winding up with a farm family named Dumont. She looked upon her master “as a God,” Truth said later, even though he beat her regularly. She ran away from the family shortly before New York abolished slavery. But over the years she sometimes slipped into the kind of dependency and acceptance of abuse common among battered women. At one point she fell in with a religious charlatan named the Prophet Matthias, whom she joined in a bizarre commune that included a fanatic who called himself “the Tishbite,” and a wealthy man whose wife was promptly appropriated by Matthias as his “match spirit.” Isabella, the only African American in the commune, stayed with the group until it broke up and even afterward continued to send Matthias money.

  Eventually, Isabella found strength in her own form of religion, which involved the traditional solace of a loving God but also added a sense of strength and specialness. She regularly saw visions and heard voices telling her she had a mission. That sort of thing was not unusual—in the nineteenth century, many women trying to gather the strength to leap over social boundaries were helped along by mystical experiences. Isabella’s visions helped her remake herself into Sojourner Truth, a woman selected by God to travel and preach. Tall, with a low, powerful voice, she became celebrated for her direct and colorful language. Addressing a women’s rights convention in Ohio, she said: “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. As for intellect, all I can say is, if a woman have a pint and man a quart—why can’t she have her little pint full?” In a famous encounter in Indiana, pro-slavery hecklers claimed Truth was really a man—an accusation frequently thrown at women who spoke in public. The hecklers insisted that Truth show her breasts to the women in the audience. Instead, she bared her breasts to the entire room, and, according to the Boston Liberator, told the men that she “had suckled many a white babe, to the exclusion of her own offspring…and she quietly asked them, as she disrobed her bosom, if they, too, wished to suck!” She went to Indiana to hold rallies when a law forbade blacks from entering the state, and when rebel sympathizers threatened to burn down the hall where she was to appear, Truth said, “Then I will speak upon the ashes.”

  Truth was one of the few public women of her day who did not pick favorites when it came to the claims of race and sex. “If colored men get their rights and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before,” she said. Not all black women agreed with her. Frances Watkins Harper decided that the women’s rights movement was a luxury reserved for the white and prosperous. “I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America,” she said.

  “DOES SHE BELONG TO YOU?”

  Elizabeth Jennings was born in New York, the daughter of a free African American tailor. One of her brothers was a businessman in Boston, another a dentist in New Orleans. Elizabeth was a teacher and an organist at the First Colored American Congregational Church. In 1854, she was twenty-four years old and unmarried. On Sunday, July 16, she was rushing to play the organ in church. She and her friend, Sarah Adams, saw a horse-drawn trolley car and held up their hand to stop it. “We were starting to get on board,” Elizabeth said later, “when the conductor told us to wait for the next car.” The one they had stopped did not bear the sign “Colored People Allowed.”

  “I told him that I could not wait…he then told me that the other car had my people in it…I then told him I had no people…I wished to go to church as I had been going for the last six months and I did not wish to be detained.” The conductor finally said she could enter, “but remember, if the passengers raise any objections, you shall go out.”

  “I answered again and told him I was a respectable person, born and raised in New York, did not know where he was born, that I had never been insulted before while going to church, and that he was a good for nothing impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church,” she recounted. “He then said I should come out or he would put me out.” The conductor tried to pull Jennings off the car while she hung on to the window. He and the driver grabbed hold of her arms and dragged her “flat down on the bottom of the platform, so that my feet hung one way and my head the other, nearly on the ground. I screamed murder with all my voice.” As soon as the driver let go to return to his horses, Jennings made another dash into the car. The driver then drove the entire trolley to the nearest station house.

  A police officer removed Jennings from the car “and tauntingly told me to get redress if I could.” She took him at his word. A public protest was held the next day, and Frederick Douglass wrote about her case in his newspaper. Supporters hired a young attorney named Chester A. Arthur to represent Jennings in court. Arthur, who later became president of the United States, had been admitted to the bar only two months before. On his advice, she filed suit for $500. The jury awarded her $225—a large sum in that era. “Railroads, steamboats, omnibuses, and ferry boats will be admonished from this, as to the rights of respectable colored people,” wrote the New York Daily Tribune, overoptimistically.

  A century before Rosa Parks made history, black women in America repeatedly stood their ground against conductors, ticket-takers, and cabdrivers who tried to turn them into second-class citizens. Frances Watkins Harper had a series of bruising fights on the Pennsylvania trains. Sarah Walker Fossett, a well-known hairdresser in Cincinnati, went to court when a conductor shoved her back on the street as she tried to board a streetcar. Mary Green, the secretary of the Lynn Female Anti-Slavery Society, refused to get off a white car in Lynn and was “dragged out…in a very indecent manner with an infant in her arms, and then struck and thrown to the ground. Her husband when he arrived on the scene, was also beaten for daring to interfere for her protection.”

  The battles went on after the Civil War. In 1865, Harriet Tubman was injured in New Jersey by a railroad conductor who dragged her out of her seat and threw her into the baggage car. At about the same time, Sojourner Truth, working in the Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, had several run-ins with streetcar conductors who refused to allow her to ride with whites. Truth fought back ferociously, had one conductor fired, and had another arrested for assault and battery. Before her campaign was over, she reported, “the inside of those cars looked like salt and pepper” and conductors were urging black women to “walk in, ladies.” But Truth was painting the brightest picture possible. She had been seriously injured by the row with the conductor, and at seventy years old, she needed a long time to recover. It must have taken her at least as long to get over hearing the conductor demand of her white colleague, “Does she belong to you?”

  “IT IS PLEASANT TO LOOK AT—

  ALTHOUGH IT IS BLACK”

  The emotional burden
s on middle-class black women in the nineteenth century were stupendous. The barrier of prejudice separated them from white people of similar taste and education, and they had almost nothing in common with the vast majority of other African Americans, who were still unschooled and rough. They felt compelled to behave with perfect decorum at all times, and it’s no wonder that many of them suffered from migraines. Black women who had the advantage of a good education were expected to use it to improve the race, to teach even if they hated the classroom. Charlotte Forten, a member of one of the nation’s wealthiest black clans, wrote that teaching children made her feel “desperate.…This constant warfare is crushing, killing me.” But she kept at it, eventually traveling south to work with newly freed slaves.

  Forten’s story was an excellent example of the pressures that confounded young black women who were financially and educationally among the most fortunate African Americans in the nineteenth century. Her family had been free Americans since long before the Revolutionary War; their lifestyle was described as “uncommonly rich and elegant.” But her father found the racism in American society unbearable and emigrated to England after his wife died, leaving his daughter with her grandparents and aunts and uncles. She was tutored at home because the schools available to blacks were inferior. When she was fourteen years old, she was sent to an integrated school in Salem, where she met all the celebrities of the antislavery movement, including William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Maria Child, and Maria Chapman. But she felt abandoned by her father and isolated. She referred to her books as her “closest friends” and strove desperately for self-improvement. (One evening, after teaching all day, she “Translated several passages from ‘Commentaries’ and finished the ‘Conquest of Mexico.’”) But she was dogged by a sense of failure. Although she bitterly resented the racism she encountered in middle-class white people, she had imbibed enough of their attitudes to look on most other black people with disdain. “He has such a good honest face,” she wrote of a wounded soldier she had met. “It is pleasant to look at—although it is black.”

  When she traveled to the Sea Islands in South Carolina to teach freed black people during the Civil War, at first her students did not know how to treat someone who seemed neither to deserve the deference they gave to white people nor the friendly familiarity with which they treated other African Americans. She eventually won them over with her piano playing, and her work with the ex-slaves seemed to give her the professional fulfillment she always sought. Personally, she was still lonely. She developed a friendship with David Thorpe, a Rhode Islander who was running a local plantation, and the local residents began to gossip about the white Yankee and the black teacher. “Rumor says he more than likes me,” she wrote bleakly in her journal. “But I know it is not so. Although he is very good and liberal he is still an American and w’ld of course never be so insane as to love one of the proscribed race.”

  Charlotte Forten must have told herself that marriage was virtually out of the question for her. But when she was forty, she met Francis Grimke, the ex-slave nephew of Angelina and Sarah who the sisters had sent to Princeton. Grimke, a minister, was twelve years younger than Charlotte, but they shared the same intellectual interests and dedication to the service of African Americans. As the son of a white man and black woman, Grimke must also have shared her feeling of not quite belonging to either race. They worked and wrote together, enjoyed the intellectual discussions they had each longed for, and lived happily ever after until Charlotte died in 1914, at age seventy-six.

  THE SOUTH

  “KEPT MOIST AND BRIGHT

  WITH THE OIL OF KINDNESS”

  Harriet Beecher Stowe insisted all her life that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not an attack on Southerners—after all, Simon Legree was a transplanted Yankee. But Southerners failed to appreciate the distinction. “Mrs. Stowe betrays a malignity so remarkable that the petticoat lifts of itself, and we see the hoof of the beast under the table,” wrote one critic. Caroline Lee Hentz, a Southern writer, produced a series of novels defending slavery even though her dialogue suggested she had never talked to a black person in her life. In the great tradition of the pro-slavery novel, her books were populated with African Americans who had no desire whatsoever to be free. “It is true they were slaves but their chains never clanked,” she wrote in Marcus Warland. “Each separate link was kept moist and bright with the oil of kindness.”

  In the pre–Civil War era, only about 5 percent of white Southern women actually lived on plantations and about half the Southern households owned no slaves at all. Still, slavery defined everything about life in the South, including the status of white women. Southern culture orbited around the strong father figure, simultaneously ruling and caring for his dependents—Mary Hamilton Campbell was struck when her servant Eliza referred to Campbell’s husband as “our master.” Black and white women never seemed to develop any sense of common cause, but every Southern female from the plantation wife to the field slave was assigned a role that involved powerlessness and the need of a white man’s constant guidance. A Southern slave owner named George Balcombe advised a friend to “Let women and Negroes alone. Leave them in their humility, their grateful affection, their self-renouncing loyalty, their subordination of the heart, and let it be your study to become worthy to be the object of their sentiments.”

  “THERE IS MANY THINGS TO DO ABOUT A PLACE

  THAT YOU MEN DON’T THINK OF”

  Southerners compared themselves to the ancient Romans, another proud race of slave owners. Dipping back two millennia, they gave their slaves names like Cato and Cicero and celebrated a culture in which families were strong, men were in charge, and slaves did the physical labor. Women were expected to follow the lead of the Roman matron, who presided over the hearth, took care of the children, and entertained her husband’s guests. Poor women, of course, did not get to stay home—they worked as seamstresses and washerwomen, often to support a family in which the man had run away or failed in his duties as a breadwinner. Slave women were expected to labor with their men in the fields. But plantation wives, who set the tone for Southern culture despite their small numbers, did not do physical housework. Their letters, which are full of reports about gardening, smoking of meat, cooking, and sewing, actually referred to work done by slaves, which the white mistress supervised.

  The overwhelming impression of the lives of most plantation wives is of isolation. When Anne Nichols moved to her husband’s Virginia estate, she wrote that she was “absolutely as far removed from every thing…as if I was in a solitary tomb.” Houses were far apart, and Southern mores prohibited ladies from traveling alone, or even with another woman. “It is quite out of our power to travel any distance this summer as we have no gentleman to go with us,” wrote a stranded plantation mistress. Considering how fragile women were presumed to be, planters left them alone on remote farms among hundreds of slaves with stunning impunity. “I presume you have planted all the crop. I have only to add that I wish you good luck and good speed,” wrote one husband in 1790. John Steele, who had been away in Washington for years while his wife ran the plantation, responded to her complaints by writing, “I know you will live disagreeably, the Negroes will be disobedient, the overseer drunken and foolish, but I must rely on your good management.” These casual demands were sometimes interspersed with reminders about the importance of maintaining the standards of Southern femininity, which the wives must have found maddening. “I would willingly follow your advice and not go in the sun if I could avoid it, but there is many things to do about a place that you men don’t think of,” wrote a Louisiana woman to the husband who had left her in charge. The husbands’ absences were not always compulsory. Southern men went to spas to “take the waters” about five times more frequently than women.

  “I WOULD NOT CARE IF THEY ALL DID GO”

  For all their indignation about Northern abolitionists, Southern women were distinctly less enthusiastic than men about the institution of slavery. Charles Eliot Nort
on, a Northerner who visited Charleston in 1855, wrote home of the strangeness of hearing principled Southern men defend slavery. “It is very different with the women,” he added. “Their eyes fill with tears when you talk with them about it.” It could be that Norton’s hostesses were simply trying to be accommodating and sympathize with their guest’s harangue. But in their journals and letters, the plantation wives frequently recorded opinions about slaveholding that were at best mixed. “In all my life I have only met one or two womenfolk who were not abolitionists in their hearts—and hot ones, too,” an overseer told Mary Chesnut, a wealthy Carolinian. Although only a handful of Southern women ever spoke out publicly against slavery, there were a number of instances in which women surreptitiously helped their own family slaves escape. A New Orleans slave, who was being sold to Georgia traders, was freed from his handcuffs by his young mistress, who pointed out the North Star to him and told him to follow it. When a Maryland plantation owner died and the slaves were scheduled for sale to pay his debts, the dead man’s granddaughter visited the slave quarters and helped them get away. In Mississippi, a fugitive slave who sought refuge with his former owner was warned by the man’s wife that her husband was planning to turn him in. She gave him money and directions that led him to the North. There is also some evidence that women who owned slaves were more likely to regard them as human beings. They emancipated favored slaves in their wills more frequently than men did and seemed more sensitive to the breaking up of slave families. When they wrote to relatives who had relocated on the frontier, women often inquired by name about the slaves who had been taken west with the settlers, something their husbands and sons almost never did. Some white women developed deep and lasting friendships with female slaves, most often the nurse who had been the family “mammy.” (Susan Davis Hutchinson reported paying a condolence call on a friend upon the death of a slave “who had been more of a mother than a servant to her.”)