By: Jan Doolittle Wilson, Wellspring Associate Professor of History
Harriet Tubman is the reason I became a historian. I discovered Tubman one day in first grade while leafing through a Scholastic Books flyer. Tucked away among the brightly colored paperback novels and trivia books was a biography titled Freedom Train: The Story of Harriet Tubman by an author named Dorothy Sterling. Despite the book’s rather unassuming cover and my unfamiliarity with its central subject, I was immediately intrigued by the flyer’s synopsis, describing a “strong-willed and courageous” African American woman who led enslaved people to freedom on something called the “Underground Railroad.”
I quickly marked Sterling’s book as one of my Scholastic orders for that month and then had to wait an agonizing three weeks for the book to arrive at school. Once I had it in my hands, I could not put it down, so captivated was I by the remarkable story of a girl who survived the horrors of enslavement, escaped from bondage as a young woman, and then risked her freedom and her life by returning to the slave South multiple times to help dozens of enslaved people flee north on the Underground Railroad — which I learned was not in fact the actual train system I had imagined from the book’s synopsis but a network of escape routes and safe houses created by abolitionists in the late eighteenth century.
Like most children’s books about Tubman from that era, Sterling’s story focused on Tubman’s antislavery work and did not emphasize the fascinating history of Tubman’s later years, when she worked as a spy, scout, and nurse during the Civil War, fought to secure civil rights for freedpeople, campaigned for women’s suffrage, and spearheaded philanthropy movements to promote care for indigent and older Americans (a history richly narrated by my colleague Kristen Oertel in her excellent biography of Tubman).
Later, as a scholar of women and gender in the United States, I appreciated in new ways Tubman’s contributions to abolitionism, civil rights, and feminism, but it was not until I began to see the world through a critical disability lens that I began to recognize Tubman’s importance to the history of disability. Tubman was badly injured at the age of 12 when an overseer, furious at Tubman’s refusal to help him restrain a young Black man attempting to flee enslavement, hurled a heavy weight in her direction, striking her in the head and nearly killing her. Months of convalescence at her mother’s home followed, but the injury left Tubman with lifelong chronic pain, periods of narcolepsy, and seizures.
Her disability reshaped her body and her mind, her position within the slaveholding system, her movements through life, and the methods and strategies by which she pursued social justice. Her strength and heroism were made possible by her interdependence on a wider community based in caring and sustainable freedoms.
Harriet Tubman was a strong, courageous Black woman, and she was disabled. Her disability was one of several key, intersecting identities that shaped her daily lived experiences. When we recognize this, we can better understand her version of freedom, notes Deirdre Cooper Owens, one in which “a disabled Black woman sat at the center of it, where Black women were liberators, and where liberation was communal and democratic.”
Does the shaping of lives and society by race, gender, sexuality, class and other factors fascinate you? If so, you’ll definitely want to check out TU’s welcoming and vibrant Women’s and Gender Studies program today.