- Sojourner Truth (1797 -1883). There were many Black women involved with the abolition movement who were known at the time but whose names are obscured today. Harriet Tubman, Frances Harper, Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Sojourner Truth. Although she was illiterate, she was a stirring and eloquent speaker and preacher and taught abolition, equality of the sexes, temperance, and prison reform. She understood the relationship between freedom for the slave and equality for all women. She was born into slavery as Isabella in New York and was freed by the antislavery law of 1827. In 1851, Sojourner Truth came forward at a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio and saved the meeting. A clergyman had just given a speech ridiculing woman as too weak and helpless to entrust with the vote. "The man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place—and ain’t I a woman? 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 born 13 children and seen most of 'em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me—and ain't I a woman?"
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