Pioneering Women
This women with remarkable faith and dignified personality had a tremendous inpact on her audiences.
Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in New York, but was freed in 1827 when that Northern state freed it's slaves by law. Once she gained her freedom, she dropped her given name Isabella, and took up the symbolic name of Sojourner Truth.
Sojourner, meaning to dwell temporarilly, which she thought to be a description of one's tenure in this life, and Truth as the message that she intended to carry around the world.She traveled around the country barefoot speaking for freedom at camp meetings and in private homes.
Sojourner attended the Women's Rights Convention in Ohio in 1851, and was the only African-American women present. The men in the audience did not believe she had a right to be involved in Women's Rights because she was black.
Amid the hissing from the men in the crowd, Frances B. Gage quoted her as speaking these famous words:
"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 plowed 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 hear the lash as well--and ain't I a woman?"
"I have borne 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?"
Sojourner was the voice of tens of thousands of suffering African-American women and through her persistance, she proved she could overcome brutality, insensitivity, and the constant discrimination that prvailed for both women and African-Americans of her time.
This woman has many labels--philanthropist, teacher, writer, social reformer, and nurse. One that best describes Dorothea Dix is "institutional reformer". From her teenage years, Dorothea was interested in teaching children, especially those too poor to aford private schools. She started several small schools and was quite successful.
On a trip to England, recovering from a physical and nervous collapse due to long hours teaching and studying and writing textbooks, Dorothea learned of terrible conditions for the mentally ill--left without civilized comforts, thrown food as if they were animals and sometimes even put on display for a fee. When she returned to America, she found conditions equally bad.
To support legislation for a state mantal hospital in Massachusetts, she visited some five-hundred jails, poor houses, and work houses. She saw arms and legs pinioned, bodies cut by whiplashes, necks bowed by fedders. Dorothea noted at Dedham: "Woman, who seem to be quite sane, tied in a dark stall behind the poor house. No one can recall why she had been put there." Legislators, skeptcal about her lengthy report had one member check on some of the locations. He reported it worse than she described! The bill passed and authorized $200,000 for a new facility.
Her intensity, once she became interested in reform, carried her to prisons, county jails, and poor houses in 18 states and several European countries. And this was in the age of pre and post civil war when transportation left a lot to be desired.
Dorothea told legislators in Raleigh NC: "I am the hope of the poor crazed beings who pine in cells and stalls and cages and waste-rooms...of hundreds of wailing, suffering creatures hidden in your private dwellings and in pens and in cabins."
During the Civil War years, Dorothea volunteered and was made superintendant of nurses for the Union army. Her intensity rose again and she ended up mobilizing thousands of women into the Army Nursing Corps and turned public buildings into hospitals to treat the wounded.
Dorotheas's compassion never seemed to end. One day, shortly before her death, she wrote poet John Greenleaf Whittier: "I have a notion to see fountain for animals set up in Boston on Milk Street, where I have often seen the tired draft horses pulling heavy loads to the dock and having no place to drink." After she died, the fountain was erected and Whittier wrote:
Stranger and traveler, drink freely and bestow a kindly thought on her, who bade this fountain flow.
Clara Barton changed the face of America with virtually every breath she took. Clara founded one of the nation's first public "free" schools, became influential in Washington D.C. working in the Patent Office, and not only established the American Red Cross, but sent the organization on a broader course internationaly as an emergency care-giver.
She was in Washington during the Civil War and began her nursing career tending soldiers from from battles nearby. Clara began gathering nursing equipment, supplies, foods and tobacco to help. But that wasn't enough-- she secured a pass that allowed her to get through the front lines where she took part in surgery, provided bandages and supplies and cared for soldiers on both sides of the battlelines. Often, she was at the front up to moments before firing started, when she would get on her horse and ride off before the troops charged at each other.
After the war, Clara organized offices to search for and identify thousands of soldiers whose families only knew them as "missing". After months of work, she identified the final resting places of some 3,000 men.
In 1884, when the Ohio river flooded, Clara chartered a steamer and sailed down the river giving food to stranded victims leaning out of upper stories of their homes.And she left fuel, seeds, and farm implements in the towns for rebuilding after the water receded.
While other women worked with the politics and philosophy of women's rights, Clara set an example and a model for women to follow in the work environment-- in the case of nursing she opened a whole new profession to American women.
