What we have here are many photos of women publicly demonstrating. There are probably 200 articles about women demonstrating in public between 1900, 1910 and 1915. That's a good chunk, and a lot for historians to draw on. What you can do is you can juxtapose these photographs, one next to the other. Some of the photographs of women publicly protesting, marching in the streets holding signs, are going to be about women who are protesting work conditions for women—striking workers, for instance—others are specific to suffrage. What I would do with students is to talk to them about the differences in the photos and the continuities, so that you can see that the suffrage movement is taking lessons from the movement to protect women workers. Which is not always the same as the socialist movement, or the general workers campaigns, partly because major organizations are run by men and do not embrace women workers and do not attempt to protect them, nor do they see them as anything really but flies in the ointment. A spare population of workers who will work for less and will dilute the ability of men to demand better conditions and wages.

If we look at the striking women workers, and you can see where the techniques that the leaders of the suffrage movement, votes for women, took their cues. And one of the things they did—which is similar to the political cartoon that we just looked at—is they made sure that all the women looked fabulous. So they are wearing big hats and they were wearing as expensive clothes as they can afford, even when they are striking women workers. This did cause comment in the newspaper because it seemed in some ways to be a contradiction of terms. You're talking about how you can't really live on the salary that you make while at the same time you're trying to look like a leisured individual.

But for the most part it worked in this important way: it got their picture taken. And it made people attracted to and amenable to their message because they looked young and fresh and fashionable and they just seemed more appealing. This is at a moment when the public sphere was becoming inundated with images and the images in large part are of women. This is the emergence of cinema; it’s the emergence of advertising. So being able to look like those images that are held up as ideals for young women gave them an edge in the public consciousness; even if it created a kind of logical conundrum. It also made them sort of stand up straighter, feel proud, feel unified by their sex. It seemed to have a real centrifugal impact on their organizing.

I would point out that about the striking workers, and if you move from looking at the striking workers to looking at suffrage parades—which became a powerful way to get the public attention by about 1910 and certainly we're at the height of this in 1913—this becomes the talk of the nation.

What you see are dramatic displays where women are coordinated in their dress. White became a symbol of the suffrage movement, so they're borrowing from the traditional iconography of womanhood, they're borrowing the notion of purity, they're also borrowing from notions of white supremacy. It sort of works on a lot of different levels.

So in, for instance, 1913 you see at the head of that suffrage parade a very well-known, young, beautiful lawyer—female lawyer—who is dressed in white in a long, white, dramatic cape and is sitting astride a pure white horse. That suffrage parade is heading past the Capitol. The first public protest to ever petition the White House, to stand outside and demand attention in front of the White House—which is a familiar image now for early 21st-century Americans [because] this is what you do when you want attention and you want to call the powers that be on the carpet and you want to demand something from them—but the first one was a suffrage parade. And it was talked about as very controversial. Women were being bold. This was lead by two leaders—young leaders; a new generation of what's often referred to as militant suffrage women, because instead of working behind the scenes and working through contacts with powerful men, they went directly to the public. They also got arrested for what they were doing and also staged hunger strikes in prison, which also got them an enormous amount of attention.

They—Lucy Burns and Alice Paul—organized this particular one on the eve of the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, the day before the inauguration. So they were very savvy. They knew the press was in town, they knew people were gathered there for the next day. And there was almost no one to greet the newly elected president when he stepped off the train because everyone was downtown watching the women marchers.

So they were very coordinated, they were all about using the press, and that's new. The press is relatively new, so it's not a surprise that 19th-century suffragists were not as able to take advantage of them—it simply didn't exist really until the end of the 1890s. It is the first time you really see the suffrage movement using that to its full advantage.

So this is probably the most famous photograph of women protesting outside of the White House. The text of their banners reads: "Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?" and "Mr. President, what will you do for women suffrage?" This is 1918, so it's at the end of Wilson's term as president and they had been waiting for Wilson to make a commitment in one direction or the other. And this is on the eve, of course, of the passage at the end of the year in 1920. You can see that they are boldly demanding, rather than politely asking. That too is a change in, not only the tactics of the suffrage movement itself, but kind of the tenor of public debate in the country. That there was an opportunity with urbanization and with increasing mass media—which became more and more, I'm sure some contemporaries thought vulgar, and other contemporaries thought frank and direct. There also is a frankness and a directness that's new to the suffrage campaign.

The parade that I was talking about was with women all dressed in white. Not all the women were dressed in white; some were dressed in academic regalia or their professional insignia to signify that these are a wide range of women from different backgrounds. That same parade allowed black women to march—at the back. And that was a, I'm sure, a very difficult moment for many of the people in the parade—for black women and for white women who had been committed to the principle of racial equality, which included many of the leaders of the suffrage movement who had made, I'm sure, some very painful compromises with that philosophy, hoping to bring Southern states, where the principle of Jim Crow and segregation was front and center throughout this time period. This is often talked about as the nadir of race relations in the United States and lynching is an issue that has been brought to the fore by black women such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who is at that parade—and refuses, in fact, to walk at the back and at the last minute just emerges out of the crowd and joins somewhere towards the middle to the front. That was also an exciting moment for Ida B. Wells-Barnett and for the history of the women's suffrage movement. Her defiance of the racism within the movement signaled an unwillingness of black women to take that backseat.

One of the things that I would emphasize with students are the abundance of political cartoons that are produced in the first two decades of the 20th century. Mainly because this is a moment when the mass circulation of daily newspapers has reached its full potential and is reaching hundreds of thousands of customers in each city locale and also across cities.

This cartoon, which is called "The Dirty Pool of Politics," and what it shows is a fashionably dressed woman with an elaborate hat and very up-to-date and trendy clothes with a shovel, and she's shoveling dirt in front of her as she goes and the dirt is characterized as "White Slavery," Graft, Food Adulteration—and these are problems of the city, of the moment. And the point of the cartoon—which says, "Can we clean it? Give us a chance"—is to talk about how women are imagined as having a greater instinct for cleaning, a greater commitment to it, and investment of it, a set of skills and experiences that allows them to be, not only the cleaners of their own homes, but municipal housecleaners. This is a very prominent theme by the 1890s and by 1900, when suffrage becomes once again on the public consciousness and you see the merging of the two kind of rival suffrage associations—the NWSA [National Woman Suffrage Association] and the American Women's Suffrage Association—the national and the American. This is what they're going to, in a large part, base their rationale on.

So instead of what we had seen for most of the second half of the 19th century, which was an emphasis on the human right to political participation that should be shared equally by men and women, so a principle, you see a change in tactics. Not that many of the suffragists actually gave up thinking along those lines, but they certainly switched rhetoric to something they felt would be more practical, more pragmatic, and some historians have used the term expedient. The one closest to hand was the idea that women are responsible for the home and in an industrialized context the home is no longer a private domicile that a woman has control over the quality of. So if you want to be able to clean up your home, if you want—one of the things in this cartoon was food adulteration, you want to make sure that the meat that your serving your children is healthy and not rotten, that the fruit is clean and hasn't been soiled by being sitting out in an open market, if you want to make sure that the water coming into the home does not have disease in it, does not have airborne or waterborne diseases. All of those things [are] going to require the woman to actually step out of the private sphere and into the public sphere and have some political participation and some influence and control.

So this cartoon shows you right at the beginning of that movement the opportunity that women are seizing upon. To say we require the vote in order to be the traditional mothers and homemakers that we agree we primarily are. It's a very powerful and very effective and strategic argument and a cartoon like this says it in a very short punchy way.

One of the things I might demonstrate for students is to how to read the document visually. So not only how to look at the caption and think about the context and talk about the politics of the moment, but also to really look at the visual. And I emphasized at the beginning of my description that this woman is very fashionably dressed. And what that should raise for students are questions of class and also questions of how women needed to portray themselves in public in order not to violate not only the traditional idea that they are the domestic managers, but also that they need to look attractive.

So one of the other things that suffragists by the early 20th century figure out and manage to get a hold on to is that they're going to be much more publicly effective if they come across as appealing, attractive, fashionable, rather than militant in a specific way, meaning hostile to the role that women play as ornament. So you see the combining of these two things—that you can be a political person who seems to be stepping out of her sphere and not unattractive to men, and not uncaring about one's appearance. And also that this is an issue that upper-class women can grasp hold of and find an investment in, in addition to their philanthropy, in addition to their charity work, they can see political participation as something that aids them in that. Because it's not—it is their home that is at issue, but it's also poor women, immigrant women, women who have recently migrated to cities who live in tenement slums whose water is choleric, whose garbage is right outside their door—homes where they don't have any control over the quality. So, I think that cartoon says a lot and you can talk to the students for a long time about all the different aspects of this.

One of the things I would also point out and that the students are usually struck by are the demon-like figures of Food Adulteration, Graft, White Slavery, Bribery—that these are the evils that plague our society at the moment. These are the things that threaten the nation, they threaten industrial production, that these are key important issues. But if you look closely at what they are, they're also a lot about two things. Political corruption, so the idea also is that women might be more moral because they come from a sphere that is imagined as uncompromised by capitalism. So they can come in with not only fresh eyes and a fresh perspective, but they are also treading on a kind of conventional idea that has grown in the minds of many for the past century that women bring a moral sensibility. So they wouldn't stand for corruption and bribery.

White Slavery is kind of thrown in there, and that might be something that you might also talk to students about—it might take you a little bit off topic, but this is how I would keep it on topic. White slavery is the notion that women—white women—rather than black people, the whiteness there is very key, are being taken across state lines, are being forced into prostitution, being forced into sex slavery. And again this is imagined as a woman's issue, because women are thought to care about the lives of other women and about the moral turpitude or the moral character in general of society at large. So there's a lot you can do with a very concise image if you really take a look at it and mine it for all the different dimensions that it presents.

One of the reasons that I think that this is a key issue is that of course there's also an anti-suffrage movement. And it's not made up only of men who can't see past the idea that women will be their helpmates and be there for them when they get home from work—it's also made up of a good number of women—a significant portion, especially of upper-class women, who feel—who agree that women might have to step out of the private sphere into the public sphere but they want to do so much more carefully. They're much more circumspect about official roles in the public sphere, particularly the vote. And here's the logic to that—and there is a logic to that, it's not simply a misogynist or diluted or consciousness problem, it’s a logic of the argument of being a social housekeeper and the moral force in society. If your moral character comes from being protected from the public sphere, it comes from being solely responsible for the care of children and loved ones in the family unit, then the fear is that if you step too far outside of that, you yourself will lose those qualities. So what anti-suffrage women argued is that women should take responsibility for households other than their own, for the community and maybe the city at large and that there were roles for them to do so. There were professional occupations such as social worker, there were reasons to do that, but that the ballot went too far. The ballot put them in the same position as men and might actually erode the special qualities that they brought to the question of something like public health. So the public health campaign is central to the Progressive era, it becomes central to the tug of war between women over whether or not to support suffrage or not.

The source is a biography of Harriet Tubman and it was written by Sarah Hopkins Bradford, who knew Tubman's family from Auburn, NY, and knew Tubman herself. [She] wrote the story of Tubman's life to try to raise money in Tubman's older age when she was quite poor. It gives us a very close account of Harriet Tubman's life, which is valuable in part because Tubman wasn't literate—she didn't read or write English. So the fact that she actually sat down with Sarah Bradford and told her story to Bradford means we can come very close to what it was that Harriet Tubman experienced.

Bradford ended up writing two different versions of this biography. The first one was written in 1868, published in 1869, and it was written really for a clearly intended purpose. Harriet Tubman was poor, she was struggling to get a pension from the U.S. government for her work during the Civil War as a nurse and also as a spy and she hadn't been successful. So she really needed money just to live on and to take care of her household. Her community members in Auburn, NY, thought that telling her life story could be a way to earn money for her. This creates a limitation on the source—it was written so that it would get an audience who would pay money to hear the story. That means that there could be some aspects of the story of Tubman's life that would be told for this audience and some that could be held back because the audience might not want to pay to hear about it.

Harriet Tubman is a mythic figure in African American history, African American women’s history—American women's history—and American history. She has an incredible life story. I think that has been a wonderful thing, but also it has been limiting because she has become a larger-than-life almost stereotype in the ways that we think about the history of slavery. She's often talked about during Black History Month, for example, but only with a sentence or two about her life. Part of the challenge in studying Harriet Tubman's life is to get beyond this picture of a super-human person who had incredible strength and did all of these things that seem impossible. It's very difficult to get at the sense that Harriet Tubman was a real person, she was born a slave on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, she had a very, very difficult childhood. She was hired out by her master at a very young age. When she was only five, she was sent to work for another family and she had charge of an infant—a five year old was a babysitter for an infant. She was expected to know how to care for this child and keep it quiet through the night, and of course she couldn't. So she would be whipped by her mistress for not taking proper care of this baby. Tubman was a real person and she suffered real trials, real hardships, under slavery. I think that that aspect of her life gets covered over when we think of her as the woman who went back to the South to save scores of slaves.

Well, she was born around 1820—it's not exactly clear when she was born because records about slaves are often limited—and when she was a young woman she decided to escape. She had already lost sisters who had been sold, and she thought that her best chance at having any kind of future was to secure her own freedom. She organized her own escape in 1849, she made it to Philadelphia, and she then spent the next decade dedicating her life to freeing other people who were enslaved: her family, other people she knew, and then also strangers. It's mind-blowing to think about the incredible dedication that Harriet Tubman had to liberty. When she wasn't going on trips to the South to free people, she was working in the North to earn money to pay for her trips. She did this for about 10 years. Around 1858 she went into maybe "semi-retirement" and she wasn't going back into the South herself, but she was using her home in New York as a place where fugitives who were continuing to head North could stop and have safe haven. When the Civil War came, she was very active working for the Union troops. She had an incredible set of skills and talents. In addition to being someone who knew the landscape well enough to be able to help slaves escape, she was really smart. She organized this spy ring to bring information to the South Carolina interior from the federal troops. She was also very caring, she was a nurse who used her knowledge of native plants to try to help the soldiers.

The biography that Bradford produced in 1869 is a very sketchy work. Bradford produced it in haste before she herself was heading off on a trip to Europe and the purpose was to earn money. The title, which is Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, really does capture what the book is; it's bits and pieces, little snippets, aspects of Harriet Tubman's life . . . of moments in her life. And it's rather disjointed. So we might desire a narrative that kind of goes all the way through connecting different parts of her life, but that's not what this source is. One thing that it does do well though is that—probably in part because Bradford was so rushed—she includes all kinds of additional information about Tubman. Letters that were written to or about Tubman, quotations from newspaper articles that were about Tubman, also appear in the book. So it is a collage in many ways of Tubman's life that allows the reader to get beyond Bradford's narrative and to look at some other primary sources from the time also.

There are many moving stories in the book. One of the most moving aspects of the source is that we get these stories more or less in Harriet Tubman's voice. Now, I say more or less because this is an "as told to" account—we have to trust Sarah Bradford to relate this to us faithfully and we weren't there, so we don't know if she did. Sarah Bradford also renders Harriet Tubman's stories in Bradford's approximation of a black dialect. Which is problematic I think for us because looking back at the source we try to imagine how Harriet Tubman might have really sounded. But, that being said, there are some really moving moments in the narrative that help to fill in the picture of Tubman's life and to put flesh on the bones of the myth of her life.

This is the moment where Tubman first escapes, and Bradford describes this as Tubman passing the "magic 'line'" from slavery to freedom. This is what Tubman says about that moment: "I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now that I was free. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven."

This to me is such a powerful representation of Tubman's feeling, of her emotional life, at this incredible turn of her life story. This is something we don't often get access to when we're trying to think about historical figures: how they actually felt about certain moments in their life. I think with Harriet Tubman, we think about her after this moment. We think about her as the Moses of her people, who's got that pistol and who's going through the swamps with her long skirts to take 10, 20, 30, 60—and Bradford actually says 300, that’s been debated—but to take all of those slaves to freedom. We don't see her as the young woman who was first escaping and who felt this incredible sense of joy and relief in the promise of a new kind of life. But, even though we get this sense of incredible joy from Tubman at this moment, immediately we see that she's going to face a complicated future.

Three paragraphs after she talks about feeling so happy that she is free, she talks about her extreme loneliness in this new state. She says, "I had crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land." So in this moment we get a real sense of a dual emotional response that Tubman is feeling. The joy at freedom, and also the despair of loneliness and the despair of knowing that people that she loves are still enslaved.

We look at Harriet Tubman as an example of someone who has been described as this sort of heroic, mythic figure; but who was a real woman who had all kinds of struggles in her emotional life. With her first husband, for example, with poverty later on in life, for example. I think that's one thing the students are surprised about. To think of Harriet Tubman as a real person who had a host of vulnerabilities. But another thing that surprises students about this book, and I think that's troublesome about this book, is that Harriet Tubman was living and working in a particular context. When she first escaped, she was not yet hooked into the Underground Railroad network, but within a couple of years she was. She was working with white abolitionists and black abolitionists to free other slaves. There were a number of relational issues that came into her movement into this new community. I think one of the things that students feel frustrated about is the way that Harriet Tubman talks about white people.

The prime audience would have been people who had been involved in the abolitionist movement—especially in Auburn, NY, where Harriet Tubman was really beloved and also in the northeast. Bradford says that with the first edition of this book that she does not have hopes for a wide readership, that she really just wants to sell enough copies so that Tubman can raise money to live on.

Now with the second edition of the book that was published in 1886, Bradford sort of enlarges her intention for the narrative. I think you can see that in the changes she makes to the book itself—it's much more organized, she collects many more letters attesting to the importance of Tubman's story. And by the second version in 1886, Bradford seems to be really committed to the idea that she wants to set Harriet Tubman's story into the memory of the nation. Letter writers whose words are also published in the second edition say the same thing, that they are worried that this woman might actually fall out of memory and that this book is important to keep her in people's minds.

I think that went we look back at some of the details that Bradford includes in the account we can sort of broaden our understanding of what might have been the possible reasons for Tubman's success. First of all, she was a remarkable person, that much is clear. She was brilliant, and she was brave. I think that those two aspects of her character combined to make her formidable to all the people who had a bounty on her head, which was said to be as much as $12,000. I think that she was a unique individual. But in addition to that, she was someone who had had lots of different kinds of experiences as a girl. When she was a girl . . . her name was Minty then, Araminta. She changed her name to Harriet, which was her mother's first name, after she escaped to protect her identity. But when she was a girl she was hired out to a number of different families, so she wasn't just working at one plantation. So she got to see a wide variety of contexts, different kinds of households; she got to hear different slaveholders talking about things that they observed, or information that they might have been bringing to their dining room tables. I think she was able to build this broad kind of file of facts, of bits of information and names of people. And I think that that helped her to be able to escape for herself, and then to aid others in escaping later on.

There's an interesting tidbit to follow up on regarding her success, which has to do with information about Tubman that comes from the Civil War period when she was a nurse to the Union soldiers and also to the black "contraband"—as they were called—black slaves who ran away and went to the Union camps. Tubman was said to have been an incredible healer by the soldiers; she was said to have understood how to use native plants. That to me is very interesting. There's only a tidbit of this in Bradford, but it suggests that Tubman knew the environment in which she lived, that she understood something about native plants in her own home of Maryland and that she applied that knowledge to other locations, [like] when she was stationed in South Carolina for instance. So she knew the landscape. She understood how plants grew, she knew the waterways, and she was very observant; this also I think contributed to her success.

Well, the relationship between oppression and agency in the history of slavery is one that is central. It's one that I think is really apparent in Harriet Tubman's life. But it can be lost if we only focus on her as a heroic figure. That's why I think the early picture of her life is so important. Trying to imagine her as a child who did not have the benefit of protection of her parents from being sent out to various people who wanted to hire her. Tubman was actually described as a sickly child: she was a small girl and very weak, and she was often ill. When she came back to her home plantation after these stints working for other people, her mother would have to nurse her back to health because of the whippings and beatings and terrible things that she had to do, such as catching rats in the rivers.

Thinking about everything that she faced as a child—her vulnerability, her realness as a person—I think helps us to remember that slavery was an incredibly oppressive system that sought to render some people out of the category of humanity. Nevertheless, people resisted this because they were human beings. We see the necessity of defining oneself as a person, a person deserving of liberty in Harriet Tubman's life. She says—and this is recounted in Bradford's biography—that she feels that she has two rights on this earth: liberty and death. That's a familiar saying. But she is saying in that line that she feels that she is a person, with the same human rights as any other person, one of those being liberty. Regardless of the fact that she was born into a circumstance that was deeply humiliating and thoroughly violent, she determined that she was not going to accept that circumstance. But, I think it's really important to say here that most enslaved blacks were not able to escape. It took a really unusual set of circumstances that allowed some people to have the opportunity to escape. Harriet Tubman is one of those people, she stands out as the sole figure who had the kind of life that she had.

Even though we can see her life as an example of resistance and agency, we always have to remember the thousands, hundred thousands, and then millions of people who did not share the life experience that she had. But we do have the lyrics to sorrow songs that Tubman told to Bradford, and that Tubman explained the use of to Bradford. The first of these songs is not titled in the source, but I'll just read a few lines from it.

Hail, oh hail ye happy spirits, Death no more shall make you fear, Grief nor sorry, pain nor (anguish) Shall no more distress you dear.

This song goes on for four more stanzas, and Bradford recounts that Tubman sang the song to her—"sweetly" is a descriptor that Bradford uses. Tubman says that this song was a song that she would use as a signal to escaping slaves. If they heard her sing that song the first time, they should pay attention. If they heard her sing it a second time, they knew that it was safe for them to leave.

There’s another song that is recounted right near the same place in the book. This is the familiar song that many of us have heard of "Go Down Moses." Tubman recounts to Bradford the lyrics in the book, saying "Oh go down Moses/Way down into Egypt's land/Tell old Pharaoh let my people go/Old Pharaoh said that we would go cross/Let my people go/And don't get lost in the wilderness/Let my people go." Now what Tubman says to Bradford about the use of this song is that if slaves who wanted to escape heard it, they should know this was a warning that they should actually stay because there was danger on the trail. These are examples of African American cultural history—lyrics to songs and their uses preserved for us right here in this account.

She was a biographer before she wrote this, and perhaps that's why Harriet Tubman's family went to her and asked her to write this book. She uses her sort of literary license to set up scenes before she moves into Harriet Tubman's voice, which she denotes with quotations marks. I think that it would be very clear to students where Bradford begins and where Tubman begins. However, again we have to rely on Bradford for the faithful rendition of Tubman's words. Those quotation marks are a good signal to us that this is what Tubman said, but we have to trust that Bradford wrote that down accurately. We also have to work our way through Bradford's attempt to render what she viewed as an African American dialect. That creates a problem I think in terms of . . . even with the quoted material, what did Bradford think she heard, what did Bradford write down, and what did Tubman actually say? Beside that sticking point, I think that it is very clear where Bradford comes in and where her voice is in this text.

Now Bradford is writing this first edition in 1868. This is a really raw moment in American history. The Civil War has just concluded and relations between blacks and whites, North and South, are by no means clear to anyone. Bradford is writing out of an understanding of black and white relations that places black people on a lower level of civilization, of intelligence, of attainment. This comes out in the way that she writes about Harriet Tubman. She talks about Harriet Tubman's story as "a little story" and she writes that she knows that some of the readers of this book will find it unbelievable that a black woman could be considered a heroine. So Bradford's position as the writer of this book is one that we need to question as we read the text, even though there are clear demarcations between her voice and the quoted material from Tubman.

Another way that Bradford's account of Harriet Tubman's life can be very useful in the classroom is as a window into the Underground Railroad and how it functioned. Harriet Tubman after she freed herself got involved with this network of people—an informal network of people—who were committed to helping black slaves escape. These were white people, black people, women, men, who sort of banded together in this common mission. Bradford's account gives us a little window into the different techniques that they would have used, which is very valuable because of course everything they did was supposed to have been secret to protect the escaped slaves from their former owners and from slave catchers.

Another way in which this text can really be interesting I think in terms of thinking about Harriet Tubman's history and black women's history, is that it shows Harriet Tubman as an intellectual. It places her within a rubric of black women's intellectual history. The history of black women's thinking as it has changed over time. I don’t think Tubman is often thought about as an intellectual, but she was as I said earlier a brilliant woman, she had to be to accomplish all that she did over the many years that she went back to the South to help so many slaves escape. We get an inkling of her thoughts in Bradford's account—we wish for more of course, we wish Harriet Tubman had written her own account—but we do get a bit in Bradford's account. One example of that is that when Tubman is living in Philadelphia, where she works to try to earn money to fund her rescue missions, a group of people invite her to come see a stage production of Uncle Tom's Cabin. She says that she will not go, she has no need to go, because Uncle Tom's Cabin can in no way capture the reality of the experience of slavery, which she herself already knows. So this is a form of cultural criticism. She is saying that as popular as this novel was, even though it was taking the country by storm, that as a former slave that she had a more accurate version of slavery than Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Going back to the beginning of when I first read Watkins, I guess I should call her since it's 1857, was actually finding the language somewhat difficult and feeling that this was a lot to slug through and that the Sojourner Truth are these kind of short sentences and to the point and really kind of skimming over this document initially and saying, my God, this is just a lot of words and, you know, how am I going to make sense of it. Couldn’t she have spoken more simply and just kind of given us the bottom line? So the need to kind of sit down and say, okay, be patient, take an hour out and just look at this speech and try and figure out what’s going on.

And so the first thing reading through and I guess the first thing I noted was all of the different geographies that came into play. And so then saying, okay, well, you know what can I do with this? And realizing that she’s then trying to put together an international context in which then to examine U.S. slavery. And then the other thing is to say, well, why all of this heavy-duty language? These sentences, some of them go on for five, six lines and you get short of breath and so I think it takes real practice at least for somebody today to be able to really speak these sentences aloud. So another thing was, like, why does she have such long sentences? I mean why not break it down and be more like Sojourner Truth?

And in fact when you read about rhetoric of the period there was a movement apparently in the 1850s and '60s towards a more colloquial style so towards the style more of what Sojourner Truth was using but maybe not so folksy. And so Abraham Lincoln is pointed out as one of the key turning points, one of the pivotal figures in moving American rhetoric to what scholars have called the more democratic style.

So one of the things when you get over being annoyed with Harper for using these really, really long sentences, is to say okay, so what was she doing? And I remember kind of going through that process and what she’s doing is really reclaiming classical rhetoric. So I think what I did was go to my books on classical rhetoric and say, boy, she really studied with Cicero. And what she did here was to figure out the way Cicero and other Latin rhetoricians spoke and to incorporate that in her speaking style which is one of the reasons why these sentences are so long.

And then the question is why? And I think that one of the things that she was doing is much more educated, was to claim the ability for blacks at this time to use classical rhetoric and this was then the whole idea that blacks in fact have a soul and they also have a mind and they’re capable of inserting themselves into western traditions. The western tradition here is that of classical rhetoric. So that her claim to authority I guess I would say is doubled. It’s her knowledge of history and her being able to say, I can make these statements because I know history. I know world history and I can compare what’s going on in the United States to what’s going on in the rest of the world. And her other basis of authority is, my language is that of the classical tradition and I am part of this time-hallowed tradition of classical rhetoric which goes back to the Latins since the Roman period.

One of the things that’s so compelling is kind of the intimacy of the tone and here she is feeling that she can speak directly to God and God isn’t a big abstract entity out there that you have to look at with any kind of reverence, but he’s there with her and they’re having a conversation, so I think that that’s something that’s really powerful.

So when I was talking before about the issue of authority, the authority that she has that she asserts here is the authority of personal experience. My personal experience is that I can go out in the field and I can talk to God. God listens to me and God answers me. And I think that that’s what the basis of her authority is here, this kind of personal relationship that she can have with God and converse with him.

We don’t have very much in terms of the way in which Sojourner Truth’s audience reacted to her. It’s hard to tell. I think that audience reaction here might have been somewhat mixed. Because Sojourner Truth couldn’t read or write, we never know exactly what she said and what she intended. So everything about her is constructed and reconstructed. So did she actually give the speech like this or not? We don’t know. And we have to rely on the authority of Olive Gilbert in order to say, well, you know, look, this is what she said or maybe it's approximation or maybe she really didn’t.

Almost all of the accounts of the time say that basically she didn't speak standard English and that she spoke in the language very much like what’s here and all of the speeches of hers that get reconstructed by her white women friends have this kind of language. And so people refer to her language as peculiar, eccentric, idiosyncratic, and quaint. But the image that you're supposed to take of Sojourner Truth is that of an illiterate person who couldn’t speak standard English. I’ve come up across a couple accounts which say that in fact she did and that she was quite capable of speaking in standard English. So one of the issues one could talk about is did her white women friends, or whites in general, want Sojourner Truth to have this kind of folksy image? And what purpose would that serve?

Some of the things that I think that we can consider when we look at these speeches is first of all the question of audience. Who were they speaking to? And in the case of Sojourner Truth and Frances Harper the audiences are quite similar. They’re white and black women or white and blacks, not just women, but a mixed white and black audience. The black people obviously would be antislavery abolitionist people. We can imagine that the white audience might be composed of both abolitionists and people who are on the fence, and so one of the ideas is to convince them of the evils of slavery. So one of the things to consider always when dealing with speeches is who is the person talking to? This is really essential.

Another thing that I think is really interesting and here we can only kind of imagine, is here are these women braving these conventions, speaking out in public to a mixed audience, what was called a promiscuous assembly, of male and female members of the audience and that was what was really considered to be taboo, was speaking to this promiscuous assembly. And so one of the questions which I think is really interesting is what did they do with their bodies? Did these women try and speak in a way that my body isn’t here, just listen to my words and don’t pay attention to my body? So the whole idea is that engaging in this kind of public speaking a women would de-sex herself. Either take away her sexuality or actually masculinize herself. So many times these women got shouted at from the audience and they’re saying, “You’re a man!” And so one of the proofs became having to prove your femininity. So another, I think, interesting question is what do you do with the body?

And in contrast to Truth, and this is what I think is so interesting and where I think these issues of the body and self-presentation are so important, is that in all of these accounts it’s very clear that Harper tried to disembody herself. So the accounts, and they’re many and they’re quite lengthy, Frances Harper got up to speak on the occasion of etc., etc. She stood there, one of the comments is quiet, very few gestures, that she keeps her body very still. There’s a lot of attention to the quality of her voice. And so her voice is rendered as melodious and musical. And her language is pure and chaste. So very different from Truth, who as I said before spoke with her body and was very happy to thrust her body and make that part of her speech. And what we have with Harper, I think, is a kind of disembodiment, almost don’t see me. I am here speaking in front of you, but don’t see me. Don’t look at my body and simply pay attention to my voice. So I think it’s fascinating to contrast the two kind of different speaking methods of the two women.

Another question is the authority to speak. Where do you get your authority to speak? If you’re a women and you’re supposed to be domestic and in the household and you're out there speaking about a very public issue, antislavery, where do you get that authority? And then in what you say, what is the basis for the authority of what you actually say? And the last thing is more kind of close attention to the language and the style of the speech itself. What are the rhetorical techniques that you are going to use in order to persuade your audience? So I think these are some of the really important questions that one can ask when looking at these documents.

The first thing that I would do is talk to students about the 19th-century voice and that the 19th-century voice is really quite different from the 20th-century voice and that it takes a while to get used to it. And then to move on from there and to say, okay, well what can I do with this unfamiliarity? And just to, you know, read the passages over to maybe look for the personal voice. You know, we all want to know "I the speaker," what makes this Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's speech as opposed to anybody else’s.

But then to realize that part of the 19th-century voice is the omission of the eye, of the personal, and that Truth is in fact much more exceptional in that way than Harper. That it is very, very hard to find any kind of personal voice or the reliance on personal experience in these 19th-century women. And that they were very determined to keep themselves, their private self in the background. That’s not what we’re about or there's this kind of reticence and this sense of privacy, which we’ve totally lost in the 20th century. But really kind of my private business is my private business. And that I am here doing the public work of racial uplift or of abolition, of anti-slavery.

One thing that you can do, and this involves more primary research, you can go and look for other versions of the speech. So for example, Sojourner Truth's very famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech is not the only version we have, there are at least three or four others. So if you go and look at that you find that was the—“Ain’t I a Woman” speech first came out, I think, in 1863 and the version was by Frances Gage, so a white woman abolitionist. And of course Sojourner Truth gave the speech at a women’s rights convention, sometime in the early '50s. So one of the things to think about is that Frances Gage was there but didn’t write up the account until 10 to 12 years later.

If you go to the newspapers of the time, the anti-slavery newspapers, there is in the Anti-Slavery Bugle, which comes out of Ohio and it’s a white abolitionist paper, about two weeks after Sojourner Truth gives that speech there is a rendition, a version, which would then be our first version of the speech. So one of the things one can do is compare those two versions and there are in fact interesting discrepancies between the two. If I remember correctly, Sojourner Truth says all of these things and then she says, “Ain’t I a woman.” That “Ain’t I a woman” phrase never appears in the 1851 Anti-Slavery Bugle version. Instead she says all these things and ends up by saying, “and I can do as much as any man.” So that’s not the same. “Ain’t I a woman” and “I can do as much as any man” is not exactly the same.

So one can go and do kind of this kind of mined archives, find other speeches and do this kind of comparative work. And then I guess what you can do is speculate on why the person writing up the particular version did it in that way. Well, first of all you have to say that we don’t know whether Sojourner Truth ever said “Ain’t I a woman” or not. We just don’t know. Assuming that she didn’t, why then would Frances Gage want to say that?

17th-century America was a very religious world. And people believed fervently in God, and along with that was a belief in the Devil. And so, what being a witch meant to people in the 17th century was that somebody—usually a woman, but not always—had signed a contract with the Devil. That contract gave the Devil permission to go into that person's body, to take their shape and go around and harm other people.

First of all since they did live in a religious world, they had to go to church services; they heard about God and the Devil all the time during a regular week. Ministers were always talking about God and Satan and how you had to be careful not to go down Satan's path, basically. The important part for this is that Puritans were very concerned that if they—they were looking for signs to see whether or not they were among the "elect." And that meant whether or not they would go to heaven once they died. So they were also looking for signs that they were actually going to hell. And looking for signs that maybe Satan was taking them along that path.

So all of this business about witchcraft, when the witchcraft accusations started in 1692, it didn't come from out of nowhere. They were just very used to thinking about God and the Devil in these kind of very . . . proximate ways—that God and the Devil were always around.

In New England there were over 200 accusations during the Salem crisis. So all of those records of people being accused, of people being—undergoing an examination, going to trial, all of this was written down. One of the questions that sometimes comes up when I teach this material is, "Why would a person confess to witchcraft?" It doesn't seem like it would have a good outcome. . . . Why? Because the rule was "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," which meant that somebody who was a witch was going to be killed, so why would you confess to this? It doesn't seem to make any sense. Well, one of the reasons—but this didn't come to light until pretty far into the whole process—but one of the reasons was that all of the confessors ended up living. And all of the people who denied ended up being hanged.

Now people didn't know this was going to happen in the beginning of the whole process, but I find this really interesting. What was going on here? At first, the confessors, they just kept them in prison. The reasoning was that they wanted them to confess, and name more names, you know, who else was involved in this witchcraft scheme? So they kept them in jail hoping that that would happen. And then ultimately when the whole thing was over they were released.

The deniers, as we'll see, were just never believed. When a person, supposedly, became a witch that meant that they had given themselves over to the Devil by signing this pact. So that was kind of like the worst thing that you could do on a spectrum of sin; I mean obviously signing the Devil's pact, that's the absolute worst thing that you could do. But it was a sin and there was a spectrum of sins in the Puritan world. And so what we see with the deniers is that they try to deny this. "No I had nothing to do with the Devil! I had nothing to do with signing his pact! Really, I'm a wife, I'm a mother, I do everything right!" And they would have supporters come in to court saying, "Yes, my wife or my aunt or my cousin or daughter—whoever—was the model of Puritan womanhood." They didn't say it in those words, but "she's just perfect, she could never have done this pact with the Devil." And then they would try to push the person to see, "Well, haven't you done some sin? Haven't you let the Devil in the door even just a little bit?" Then these women who were good Puritan women kind of had to admit that, "Yeah, okay, maybe a little bit I let Satan in the door." Then the accusers—the court—would just kind of seize on that saying,"Really? You let the Devil in your heart? What did he look like? What shape? When did he come to you?" And kind of push them, push them.

So let me give an example of that. Okay, so this is a woman named Rebecca Eames. She was accused of witchcraft, and her confession—I'll just read this. You can see how several things are blending together here in her confession. She says:

She explains to the court that after making a black mark with her finger, sealing the covenant.

So she's admitting that she signed the Devil's book. And this is a quote from the source:

She was then in such horror of conscience that she took a rope to hang herself and a razor to cut her throat by reason of her great sin and committing adultery. And by that the Devil gained her, he promising she should not be brought out or ever discovered.

So that's her confession. It doesn't really say anything about witchcraft, doing anything wrong, harming any other people. What it says is that she signed this compact with the Devil because he told her she wouldn't get found out about the sin of adultery. So she's bringing something else up all together, this is one of the occasions where I want to just yell back to Rebecca, "Don't mention the adultery! That's not what they're asking you! Just talk about witchcraft, you didn't do it." So this confession really displays this terrible confusion on the part of some women who confessed, and we'll see how they talk about the deniers in kind of a different way. But the idea is that some women I think unwittingly said, "Yes, I signed the Devil's book" when really they meant "Yes, I've done some sin in my life"—as everybody did, there wouldn't have been any person who would have said, especially not a woman, "I'm free from sin." That just wasn't part of their worldview of how sin and godliness worked.

Okay, so let's look at this Rebecca Nurse's denial:

Rebecca says, "I have none but old age."

This is coming in the middle of a several-page exam and the question to which she's responding here, they ask her something like, "What infirmities do you have? Why haven't you been to church meeting? What's wrong with you?" basically. And she says, "Nothing, I'm just old."

And then the magistrate says, "You do know whether you are guilty and have familiarity with the Devil? And now when you are here present to see such a thing as these testify a black man whispering in your ear and birds about you, what do you say to it?"

And she says, "It is all false, I am clear."

And the magistrate says, "Possibly you may apprehend you are no witch. But have you not been led aside by temptations that way?"

She says, "I have not."

And the magistrate says, "What a sad thing it is that a church member, here and now another of Salem, should be thus accused and charged."

And then the narrator says, "Mrs. Pope fell into a grievous fit and cried out, 'a sad thing, sure enough!' And then many more fell into lamentable fits."

So even if you just take that paragraph you can see how the magistrates are pushing her to admit to something. She was an elderly woman, really pious, everybody agreed—everybody was surprised that she had been accused of witchcraft because it just seemed that that would be the farthest thing from anything that she would do. She says that she's clear, but they say, "Okay, maybe you're not a witch but haven't there been any temptations that have come your way?" And she says no here, but as it goes on you can see how they're just trying to get her to say, "Okay, fine!" but she doesn't. So she ends up denying the whole thing, she sticks with her denial, and in the end she is hanged for this because she couldn't prove—as it was hard for any of the deniers to prove—that not only did they not sign the Devil's book, but they were perfect in every respect, they had done no sin. That was just something that wouldn't have been believed because everybody kind of agreed that people were sinners, and they were more likely to believe that women were sinners than men.

Okay, so the other thing that's compelling here is that—this part where it says, "Mrs. Pope fell into a grievous fit and cried out. . . ." The broader context is that it's happening in what's become a courtroom—the church meeting house has basically become a courtroom—and everybody in the town is there. It's not like today's court where somebody would say, "Quiet down or I'm going to kick you out!" There was a lot of raucousness going on and people were screaming out, saying, "Yes, she is a witch!" And it was hard, even for Rebecca Nurse, for people to dismiss all that.

The magistrate says, "Well, then, give me an answer now, do you think these suffer against their wills or not?

She says, "I don't think these suffer against their wills."

"Why did you never visit these afflicted persons?"

She says, "Because I was afraid I should have fits too."

And then the narrator says, "Upon the motion of her body fits followed upon the complainants abundantly and very frequently." So if she ran her hand through her hair or something, then the people who were doing the accusations would also run their hands through their hair and mimic what she was doing. Which again, this is something that seems ridiculous to us, but to them it seemed very compelling. What could be better proof that something strange is going on here?

At the very end the magistrate says, "Do you believe these afflicted persons are bewitched?"

And she says, "I do think they are."

Now, she feels that she has nothing to do with it, but even the fact that she's saying, "I do think they are," that kind of implicated her even further because everybody assumed that she probably did have a hand in it. Even though Rebecca Nurse knew she was innocent and fought for her innocence until they hanged her, she had some sense that she wasn't free from sin. Not that that meant that she deserved this or she had signed the Devil's book according to their theories, but you can see that this made me think that a lot of women probably shared this sentiment. She says, "Well, as to this thing, I am innocent as the child unborn, but surely," she said, "what sin [has] God found [out] in me unrepented of that He should lay such an affliction upon me in my old age." She knows she is not a witch, but she is trying to search her innermost thoughts to think, "Well, what have I done that I still haven't repented for that this is my punishment?"

So the confessions are very different. We can look at a confession by a woman, Mary Osgood. I asked this question earlier, and I ask my students, why would a person confess to witchcraft? Partly I think the reason is that after a while—and by September when she confessed, this might have been her situation—that she thought that she'd get off if she confessed because they didn't seem to be hanging the confessors; so that seemed like a good strategy. But more than that what I like to look for in these confessions is, what was compelling to the magistrates? You couldn't just say, yeah, I did it, and call it a day. You had to—the confessions had to be realistic, it seems weird to say they have to be realistic, they sound so preposterous, but realistic to the audience. I think what we have here in the confessions is a justification and a legitimation as to what the court was doing. Because there was some criticism about the way the court was handling the whole thing. So in these confessions, in a lot of them, you have a lot more going on than just a simple, yes, I did it.

She confesses that "about 11 years ago when she was in a melancholy state and condition she used to walk abroad in her orchard, and upon a certain time she saw the appearance of a cat at the end of the house, which yet she thought was a real cat. However, at that time it diverted her from praying to God, and instead there of she prayed to the Devil. About which time she made a covenant with the Devil, who as a black man came to her and presented her a book. Upon which she laid her finger and that left a red spot. And that upon her signing, the Devil told her he was her god and that she should serve and worship him. And she believes she consented to it. She says further that about two years ago she was carried through the air in the company of Deacon Frye's wife, Ebenezer Baker's wife, and Goody Tyler to Five Mile Pond where she was baptized by the Devil, who dipped her face in the water and made her renounce her former baptism and told her she must be his soul and body forever and that she must serve him, which she promised to do."

So there's a lot going on here. She is really giving the court exactly what they want to hear. Because—and also what people in the audience and the ministers and everything would have recognized this kind of language because for one thing, beyond the bounds of the witchcraft crisis, ministers would have told people in church on Sundays and other days of the week that you have a choice between God or the Devil, its up to you—you can choose to go God's path, you can take Satan's path. So she's basically saying that back, that she had a former baptism but then the Devil came to her, presented her with this book, she had to renounce her former baptism, go with him. The key part here is that she consented to it. She confesses she has afflicted three persons, and she mentions the people and that she "did it by pinching her bedclothes and giving consent that the Devil should do it in her shape. And that the Devil could not do it without her consent." So she says this a number of times, and I think this was appealing to the court to hear this, to the magistrates, to hear this. It's like, "Oh, look, we are doing the right thing. The Devil just can't go and take anybody's shape, or he doesn't seem to want to do that, he wants to get their consent. He wants to get these witches' consent, that's what makes somebody a witch." So I think it was very legitimating to their whole process, even though they were under some fire for the way they were proceeding.

Another thing that she says that's important, that also would have resonated with people at the time. The question is, "Do you know the Devil can take the shape of an innocent person and afflict?" And she says, "I believe he cannot." And they say, "Who taught you this way of witchcraft?" And she says, "Satan," and that he "promised her abundance of satisfaction and quietness in her future state, but never preformed anything. And she has lived more miserably and more discontented since than ever before." So this would have also been an interesting thing for them to hear and kind of a realistic thing because in the context of a weekly sermon the minister might have said, "If Satan tries to lure you into his clutches, he might promise you a lot of things. You might think that he's going to come through on those things but he never does. So that's not a good idea to go down his path." So she's kind of mimicking exactly what the ministers might have said. He promised her things, but never performed anything; and not only that, but she's been miserable ever since. So I can almost imagine people saying, "Yep, yep, that's how the Devil is. He's very clever that way. That's how it works."

Anyway, so there are these elements in a confession that show, to me, that one of the key issues to look at is not so much why people confessed, but how they confessed. What were the important elements that made for a successful confession? And a "successful confession" meaning one that you didn't die as a result of. I think in general Puritans were more likely to—even though they thought that men and women were equally available to bond with the Devil—they thought that women were more likely to. That women were—had a predisposition to bond with Satan.

Sometimes [my students] ask about the people doing the accusing, what was motivating them? Didn't they feel bad that people were dying as a result of what they were doing?

One of my responses is that, have you ever said something, and you knew it wasn't exactly right, but people seemed to respond in the way that you wanted. So you couldn't go back and say, "Oh, no, no, that was an exaggeration, I made that up." You'd get in trouble or whatever. And they all can relate to that.

Also I think this speaks to this question that there was a lot of confusion going on, so maybe the accusers were just doing it out of malicious intent or they had a history of bad feelings about a particular family that they were accusing the woman of. But maybe something bad did happen to them that they really did think that this person caused it. People were talking all the time about "so-and-so walked by the house five years ago. After that, our cow died." This didn't seem preposterous to them; witchcraft was a way of answering certain strange things that happened in their world. Again, very credible to actually think, "Yeah, my cow died and it probably was this person. And we've had some bad dealings. . . ." So all these things kind of add up. They're really racking their brains to see what they did in their life, and really soul searching and being good Puritans. That's what you were supposed to do all the time, this constant soul searching. Like with anything that you study historically, there really isn't one answer to any of these questions that can be raised about Salem. There's just little glimmers that we think well maybe, maybe this is what was going on.

Some people recanted, they initially confessed and then took it back. Here are just a couple of sentences from this person Margaret Jacobs. She wrote to her father from Salem Jail that she had confessed. Here's just a couple words that I think are so significant. She confessed by reason of "the magistrates' threatenings and my own vile and wretched heart." So you have both things going on here. She's pressured into confessing—she feels pressure, external pressure; but she also feels this internal pressure that her "own vile and wretched heart," something about her past sins, caused her to confess. She says in a later statement she characterized her confession as completely false, saying that she had "been hurried out of my senses by the afflicted persons. Saying they knew me to be an old witch and if I would not confess I should very speedily be hanged. Which was the occasion with my own wicked heart of my saying what I did say."

This is one of the values of actually looking at the primary documents and immersing yourself in them. I think it's more important to emphasize that, rather than emphasize the narrative of what actually happened. In fact, when I teach this I barely even tell the students what happened, how it ended, any of it. I just say here's the Salem witchcraft trials; I explain what I explained here, let's look at this. So they don't even know really—because most of them haven't even done the reading until before the exam—so they might not even know the outcome. We just plunge in to look at this. I think that helps because then they're not so focused on how it ended or how things could have gone differently. They can ask those questions by looking at this, what if they hadn't pushed them, then would that of. . . . Well someone will inevitably ask, why didn't they just question them in private? That would have avoided a lot of the shrieking in the actual courtroom, the whole courtroom drama. And then I'll say, well, that's a really good idea, asking in private. One of the women who was accused did say to the magistrates, "Look, this is insanity, what's going on here. Why don't we pursue this in private?" Sure enough, that suggestion, in combination with other things that contributed to the ending of the whole thing, did help to tone everything down. Because when you don't have that and you're just one-on-one it's a very different dynamic.

So anyway, sometimes it's better not to give students everything because then they think that there's no need to look at the primary sources so much if they already know the answers. Because many of them just want the answers for the test, whereas I don't want them to focus so much on the answers, I want them to see the process unfold. Because to me that's the exciting part of being a historian, and I try convey that to them that that's the exciting part. Let's see what these people were thinking. To us it seems so out of our range of what's normal, but this was normal for them. So what's going on here? Let's focus on the primary sources.