ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses life history of Sojourner Truth, a feminist thinker. Truth demonstrates at the level of her person the ongoing challenge to refigure the body politic of a nation that began as both a slave state and as a location for individual and collective self-determination. Her work reveals that a theory of individual freedom must recognize the conditions that make freedom possible-economic, spiritual, embodied, and legal. A black feminist in the nineteenth century, Truth shows how freedom takes shape in relation to dominant identities of whiteness, maleness, and property. Truth challenges the unexamined view of women as represented in women's rights arguments. Truth's public presence transgressed many social norms of gender, race, and class. In 2009 Sojourner Truth became the first African-American woman memorialized with a bust installed in Emancipation Hall at the US Capitol Visitor Center in Washington, DC. after a decade-long push by the National Congress of Black Women.
