SOURCE: “Difference, Slavery, and Memory: Sojourner Truth in Feminist Abolitionism,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America, edited by Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, Cornell University Press, 1994, pp. 139-58.

In the following essay, Painter presents a brief history of Sojourner Truth's life and also examines her place in cultural history.

The issue of race is always present in American culture, especially in large areas such as women's rights. Understandably, Americans often try to avoid the issue, for race can still sabotage analysis of terms as essential as the nineteenth-century formulation of woman. When race is acknowledged in discussions of American culture, the significance of the whole and the parts alters, subtly or drastically. Words and phrases acquire additional connotations, and lines of reasoning may twist imperceptibly. Large parts of social equations may disappear, as other parts are enhanced. Often the undeniable importance...