This week we look at four women who are recognized as being ‘liberators and prophets'. They are linked together in Lesser Feasts and Fasts as women who made a difference in their worlds. All four are remembered on July 20.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Amelia Bloomer were active leaders in the movement for women’s suffrage (the right to vote) and abolition. Sojourner Truth and Harriet Ross Tubman were both, like Harriett Beecher Stowe from last week, abolitionists. However, they were black women who were able to address the issue entirely differently.
Their lives spanned over a century. Sojourner Truth was born around 1797 and died in 1883. Stanton was born in 1815 and died in 1902, Bloomer was born in 1818 and died in 1894, Tubman was born about 1821 and died 1913. The impact they made by their words and actions were immense.
Sojourner Truth was born a slave in Ulster County, NY and given the name Isabella Baumfree. She purchased her own freedom at 28. On June 1, 1843 she changed her name to Sojourner Truth after experiencing religious visions, became a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in New York City, and became an important speaker. Sojourner Truth advocated for women’s rights and abolition. In her famous Ain’t I a Woman speech at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, OH, Truth famously remarked, “What's [intellect] got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full? Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, on the other hand, was a white woman born in Johnstown, NY. She graduated from Emma Willard’s Female Seminary in Troy, NY. Eight years later, in 1840, she attended the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London with her husband. In 1848 Stanton held a women’s rights conference at the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Seneca Falls, NY. After meeting Susan B. Anthony in 1851, they worked together for women’s rights. Her work for abolition also continued. She founded the Women’s Loyal National League during the Civil War, collecting 300,000 signatures demanding the immediate end to slavery by constitutional amendment. Stanton served as the first president of the American Woman Suffrage Association. (She served for 21 years.) In her later years she co-authored the Woman’s Bible and a three volume History of Woman Suffrage. She also published her memoir, Eighty Years and More in 1898, four years before her death.
Harriet Ross Tubman was born a slave in Dorcester County, Maryland and given the name Araminta. She later changed it to Harriet. In 1849, at about 28 years of age, she escaped slavery and became a fugitive. She became a leader in the Underground Railroad and helped more than 300 slaves to freedom. During the Civil War she worked as cook, laundress, and nurse for the Union Army, as well as a spy behind Confederate lines. Following the War, she settled in Auburn, NY, where she ran a home for children and poor older people that continued even after her death. Her story is told in Moses of her People, published in 1886.
Each of these women was a living example of 1 Peter 4:10-11, the Epistle for their day. “Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received. Whoever speaks must do so as one speaking the very words of God; whoever serves must do so with the strength that God supplies, so that God may be glorified in all things through Jesus Christ. To him belong the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen.”
Their lives, individually and together, are a testimony to the power of working in ‘the strength that God supplies’ and using ‘whatever gift each of you has received’. The collect for the day calls us to pray for strength, vision, and courage to stand against oppression and injustice to work for liberty:
“O God, whose Spirit guides us into all truth and makes us free: Strengthen and sustain us as you did your servants Elizabeth, Amelia, Sojourner, and Harriet. Give us vision and courage to stand against oppression and injustice and all that works against the glorious liberty to which you call all your children; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen”
Is there an injustice you are passionate about?
What can you do, even in a small way, to take a stand?
https://www.episcopalchurch.org/library/glossary
