What Every Woman Should Know is a bi-weekly series on American Women’s History.

Samplers are an aspect of history that is exclusively associated with women. As many feminists have noted, sewing has traditionally been women’s work, and it has been the assignment of just this kind of tedious, time-consuming labor that has contributed to our inability to participate meaningfully in the public sphere in ways that men have, among other consequences we’ve suffered. Few will argue that having literally clothed all of humanity for millennia, we have universally been a kind of slave in a system that shunned and thwarted us, and used us for our free labor.

19th Century Sampler

But what is a sampler? Samplers were long pieces of cloth that a woman would use over the course of her life to accumulate ideas for sewing patterns. When a woman would see a pattern that she wanted to remember, she would sit right down and sew her example onto her sampler for future reference. So a sampler is a collection of lessons accumulated over time—an educational tool as much as a practical solution. Women would often later collect their best ideas on one piece of cloth, sort of like collecting works for publication; these samplers were for display. Some families had samplers that were passed on from one generation to the next, often by way of wills.

Sewing has been our legacy until lately, and our contributions have been so under-valued that the technology of our work had barely been improved upon from the spinning wheel and needlepoint to the development of the sewing machine and paper patterns in the 19^th century. Women have been forced, without the benefit of education or any knowledge of mechanics, to create their own solutions in accumulating knowledge and passing it on. One way they did so for hundreds of years was with the sewing sampler.

The sampler is the perfect frame for a discussion of several prominent African American women, a frame I will use again when I want to collect connected threads of history under one topic. Black women’s history is even more hidden that white women’s history and, like our foremothers, we will have to improve upon the technology and formulate the solutions ourselves. Like women throughout centuries, we are accumulating knowledge, building a body of reference work that we will one day hand down to our daughters. Here then, is my collected sampler of American black women’s history.

Black Female Poets

How powerful must be poetry that even a life of servitude cannot thwart the impulse, nor can the suffocating affects of racism. While there are many black female poets in the history of America (I invite you to share your favorites in comments), I want to tell you about two very special forgotten ladies: Phillis Wheatley (b. circa 1754, d. 1784) & Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958).

Phillis Wheatley Tribute at the Boston Women’s Memorial

Phillis Wheatley was by turns a slave, a poet, a free woman, and the first African American female to publish a book and support herself with her writing. Born in Gambia, not much is known about her early years before she arrived in America and was bought by the Wheatley family of Boston, Massachusetts. She was about 8 or 9 when that happened. There is neither record from history nor memory from Wheatley herself as to what her birth name was; she was named after the ship that brought her over—The Phillis.

The Wheatley family educated Phillis Wheatley alongside their own daughter, who was of similar age, and the two girls began to write poetry at a very young age. Despite their barbaric values regarding owning other humans, the Wheatleys were kindly enough to encourage her in her poetry, allowing her to publish her first poem at the tender age of twelve. Consider that for a minute: a child arrives on the cusp of adolescence, as Maya Angelou (another African American female poet) would say over 200 years later: bought, sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare, praying for a dream. Within four years she was educated enough in her new culture to participate meaningfully within it, despite the bonds of servitude. All of this, mind you, happened before America formally existed.

Wheatley’s awareness considering her circumstances was amazing. Her poetry is beautiful and learned, at times even angry, straining to articulate the emotional bankruptcy of her experience as a slave. In one of her most famous poems, Niobe in Distress, she expresses anger at the disparity between the white privilege she saw daily and the treatment she also received daily. To wit:

Niobe comes with all her royal race,
With charms unnumber’d, and superior grace:
Her Phrygian garments of delightful hue,
Inwove with gold, refulgent to the view,
Beyond description beautiful she moves
Like heav’nly Venus, ‘midst her smiles and loves:
She views around the supplicating train,
And shakes her graceful head with stern disdain,
Proudly she turns around her lofty eyes,
And thus reviles celestial deities:
“What madness drives the Theban ladies fair
“To give their incense to surrounding air?
“Say why this new sprung deity preferr’d?
“Why vainly fancy your petitions heard?
“Or say why Cæus offspring is obey’d,
“While to my goddesship no tribute’s paid?
“For me no altars blaze with living fires,
“No bullock bleeds, no frankincense transpires,
“Tho’ Cadmus’ palace, not unknown to fame,
“And Phrygian nations all revere my name.
“Where’er I turn my eyes vast wealth I find,
“Lo! here an empress with a goddess join’d.

If you don’t know the ancient story of Niobe, I recommend checking it out here.

Angelina Weld Grimké

Almost 100 years after the death of Phillis Wheatley, another American poet was born. Angelina Weld Grimké had an impressive pedigree. Bi-racial, she was the product of a union between Sarah Stanley Grimké, the white daughter of a formerly slave-owning-turned-abolitionist family, and Archibald Grimké, a prominent Civil Rights leader at the time. Her great-aunts were Sarah and Angelina Grimké, two power houses in the abolitionist movement, and later in the feminist movement of the mid-19^th century. Angelina Weld Grimké was named after the latter great-aunt, who had died the year before she was born.

Grimké was a Harlem Renaissance poet, though she is often footnoted as a “pre-cursor” to the movement. Considering most of her poetry was published during the Harlem Renaissance, I’m not exactly sure why this is except that perhaps she was older that more celebrated poets like Hughes and Cullen, and her location in Washington D.C. until late in the movement may have led to her historical exclusion. Her poetry, like Wheatley’s, showed an awareness of her circumstance that is profound for the modern reader. How long, exactly, have we been pursuing these goals of equality and justice? How long have we been aware, despite the intentionally confusing frames, of our own oppression and suppression?

Grimké’s poem At April is an early example of a style that would dominate and continues to dominate black female poetry to this day—the truth and celebration of black female bodies. Poems by subsequent poets, such as Angelou’s Still I Rise or Lucille Clifton’s Climbing, are very much in the theme Grimké set with this poem:

At April

Toss your gay heads,
Brown girl trees;
Toss your gay lovely heads;
Shake your downy russet curls
All about your brown faces;
Stretch your brown slim bodies;
Stretch your brown slim arms;
Stretch your brown slim toes.
Who knows better than we,
With the dark, dark bodies,
What it means
When April comes alaughing and aweeping
Once again
At our hearts?

Wheatley and Grimké are examples of women who broke from patterns, who did the unexpected. They used their talents to stitch together words that would come to inspire generations of Americans. Their legacies live on in the fabric of modern American poetry, their stitching providing samples from which today’s young poets can and do learn.

Black Women in Abolition and First Wave Feminist Movements

Think of the number of stitches a slave woman might have sewn over the course of her life. How many do you suppose? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? Wouldn’t it be nice if science actually thought to calculate these numbers, instead of the average number of ejaculations per white male over the course of a lifetime? I jest, but it’s hardly funny because such a study is unlikely; it’s funny because it’s so likely!

Black women’s history is necessarily partially a story of American slavery, because of our history and that “peculiar institution” we kept for so long after other enlightened nations gave it up. Yet before the peculiar institution was finally outlawed in the wake of the Civil War, female slaves had been breaking their own patterns. Consider the stories of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.

Sojourner Truth

This quote by Sojourner Truth (birth name: Isabella Baumfree) graces the front page of the New Agenda:

“If women want any rights more than they’s got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it.”

That quote is typical of her no-nonsense-tell-the-truth rhetorical style. This style was her manner from an early age, and one she was somehow able to keep intact, despite the often brutal treatment she received at the hands of multiple owners, which she documented in her auto-biography, Narrative of Sojourner Truth; a Bondswoman of Olden Time, Emancipated by the New York Legislature in the Early Part of the Present Century with a History of her Labors and Correspondence, Drawn from Her Book of Life. Truth’s narrative is one of only two female slave autobiographies ever published, the other being that of Harriet Jacobs.

Many school children are aware of her famous speech, “And Ain’t I Woman?” which she delivered at the 1851 Ohio Women’s Convention, held in Akron. Of course, the details of her circumstances as a slave are glossed over, that children may celebrate her spirit without knowing the awful truth of our collective heritage. The story of her escape is practically unknown, and since it began her trajectory as a memorable character from American history, our focus is this topic. From the biographical link provided below under Sources:

The state of New York began in 1799 to legislate the gradual abolition of slaves, which was to happen July 4, 1827. Dumont had promised Isabella freedom a year before the state emancipation, “if she would do well and be faithful.” However, he reneged on his promise, claiming a hand injury had made her less productive. She was infuriated, having understood fairness and duty as a hallmark of the master-slave relationship. She continued working until she felt she had done enough to satisfy her sense of obligation to him — spinning 100 pounds of wool — then escaped before dawn with her infant daughter, Sophia. She later said:

I did not run off, for I thought that wicked, but I walked off, believing that to be all right.

Bolding mine. I walked off, believing that to be right. Sojourner Truth had a remarkable talent, despite being denied an education, for reframing an action so that the justness of it was evident. Why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it? The absurdity of petitioning a power structure that hates us is evident in that one line. She also said, Truth is powerful, and it prevails. I trust this intuitively, for if I did not surely I would be mad at the futility of our pursuits. Let her words take you as well, and give you hope, for it is unlikely you have seen such depths or felt such heights as Sojourner Truth.

Harriet Tubman

Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman are probably the best known examples of black women’s history, but did you know that Harriet Tubman freed over 300 black slaves in about a decade? Did you know that she undertook more than 20 covert missions into the South, bringing groups of slaves into the North along the Underground Railroad? This is after she secured her own freedom via escape, and despite the fact that she was still hunted as a runaway slave. She accomplished all of this as an uneducated, illiterate woman who had been entirely denied any political right, even to her own agency. Tubman had an intuitive understanding of Truth’s idea to just “take it [rights]” despite the brutality of a system that sought to deny these women and men everything.

Harriet Tubman was also a spy for the Union during the Civil War, in addition to duties as a nurse and cook for troops. According to Lewis (linked below):

[T]he Union Army asked Harriet Tubman to organize a network of scouts — and spies — among the black men of the area. She not only organized a sophisticated information-gathering operation, she led several forays herself in pursuit of information. Not so incidentally, another purpose of these forays was to persuade slaves to leave their masters, many to join the regiments of black soldiers. Her years as “Moses” and her ability to move about secretly were excellent background for this new assignment.

In 1863 she led troops dispatched to secure the Combahee River area, and helped free 750 more slaves in the process. On the trip home, she managed the slaves, who were transported north. She was also caught in Confederate fire. General Saxton, upon reporting the details to Secretary of War Stanton, had this to say about her work on the expedition:

This is the only military command in American history wherein a woman, black or white, led the raid and under whose inspiration it was originated and conducted.

Thus, according to military experts at the time but not acknowledged in her history today, Harriet Tubman was most likely the first female to ever led U. S. military troops. Despite their ability to discern the truth of her experience, the United States government would not reward her for her service:

Harriet Tubman believed that she was in the employ of the U.S. Army. When she received her first paycheck, she spent it to build a place where freed black women could earn a living doing laundry for the soldiers. But then she wasn’t paid regularly again, and wasn’t given the military rations she believed she was entitled to. She was paid only a total of $200 in three years of service. She supported herself and her work by selling baked goods and root beer which she worked on after her work duties were complete.

After the war was over, she was never paid her back military pay, and when she applied for a pension, her application was denied. Secretary of State William Seward, Colonel T. W. Higginson, and General Rufus supported her claim, but it was denied. Harriet Tubman did eventually receive a pension — but as the widow of a soldier, her second husband.

Thus ends our first Black History Sampler. Very soon we will revisit this topic again in Part II, which will explore modern black women’s history, where you will meet women like Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman to run for President.

When next we meet over the topic of American Women’ History, it will be March, Women’s History Month, and we’ll begin to trace the trajectory of our pursuit of voting rights and our subsequent political participation.

Sources:

Phillis Wheatley Biography
Complete Works of Phillis Wheatley

Angelina Weld Grimké Biography
Angelina Weld Grimké Selected Poetry

Sojourner Truth Biography
Harriet (Tubman) The Spy
Harriet Tubman Biography