Junko Tabei (née Ishibashi; 22 September 1939 – 20 October 2016) was a Japanese mountaineer, author, and teacher.
In 1969 Tabei started the first women’s climbing club in Japan, not to emphasize the woman part, but in order to avoiding the annoying men who gave her a hard time in other climbing clubs. The Club embarked on their first expedition in 1970, climbing the Nepalese mountain Annapurna III. They successfully reached the summit using a new route on the south side, achieving the first female and first Japanese ascent of the mountain.
Mountain climbing of this caliber ran counter to the feminine indoctrination required of Japanese women. The climbers in the club had to transform themselves:
“Her job as group leader required asking a lot of questions, but many people in Japan consider this—to admit you don’t know something—a sign of weakness. The image of the woman whose strength is her ability to remain silent is still powerful in Japan.
“When we began the climb we were determined to only show each other our strong sides,” Tabei says. “When you are climbing a mountain, your life depends on the exact opposite. You can’t be reserved and not say what you think or feel.”
Several of the women on the Annapurna III ascent became sick from the altitude. Yet no one wanted to admit to weakness. Tabei was responsible for her fellow climbers, and she needed to know the truth about their conditions and capabilities. “You need to have a relationship where, when you’re climbing, you can say, ‘I need to go slower,’” she says.
Go slow they did, eventually reaching the summit [of Annapurna III] on May 19, 1970. The ascent profoundly changed Tabei. For her, there would be no more slaving into the late hours to prove she was her company’s most loyal worker. No more fears about speaking her mind. No more concerns about what people said behind her back. “If people want to call me ‘that crazy mountain woman,’ that’s O.K.,” she says.” (Robert Horn in Sports Illustrated, April 29, 1996)
She was the first woman to summit Everest, in 1975, as part of a team of women, but for logistical reasons she was the only one who made it to the top. When she got there she didn’t cry out in celebration, she just thought, “Oh, I don’t have to climb any more.” Later she said that she didn’t understand why men made such a big deal out of climbing Everest, it’s just a mountain. Still: “There was never any question in my mind that I wanted to climb that mountain, no matter what other people said.”
Oh, and on that Everest climb her team had been buried in an avalanche. Tabei had been rescued by one of their Sherpas, who pulled her out of the snow by her feet. It was two days before she was well enough to proceed.
She never accepted corporate sponsorship after Mount Everest, preferring to remain financially independent. She saved money to fund her expeditions by working as an editor, making paid public appearances, guiding mountain-climbing tours, and tutoring local children in music and English. Tabei’s friends and supporters sometimes donated food and equipment.
Tabei was instrumental in the movement to clean up the mountain climbing routes which were getting buried with climbers’ trash. This meant organizing expeditions with the sole purpose of cleaning up the environment. Tabei also wrote seven books during her life.
In 1992 she was the first woman to complete the Seven Summits challenge by climbing the highest peak on each of the seven continents: Everest (1975), Kilimanjaro (1980), Mt. Aconcagua (1987), Denali (1988), Mt. Elbrus (1989), Mount Vinson (1991), and Puncak Jaya (1992). By 2005, Tabei had taken part in 44 all-female mountaineering expeditions around the world.
When she died at 77 years old in 2016 she had only stopped climbing for two weeks. Her goal had been to climb the highest peak in every country, even though she had been battling cancer since 2012. She had made it up the highest peak in 76 countries. A google search tells me there are 195 countries. She must have known she would never achieve the goal, but still she kept going.
An astronomer named an asteroid “6897 Tabei” after her and in 2019, a mountain range on Pluto was named “Tabei Montes” in her honor.
The first thing I want to say about Alice Paul is that she was not an intersectional feminist. She believed that the problems of Black women were caused by racism, which she thought was a separate struggle, and Alice’s strategy did not include foregrounding the liberation of Black women. She thought that full inclusion of Black women in suffrage activities would alienate the white women in the South and she decided that it was more important to unify white women than to fully include ALL women. She thereby lost the chance to use the full power and voice of Black women to further the cause of women’s rights, and missed the opportunity to amplify Black women’s voices. We now know that this was the wrong thing to do. It is always the right thing to listen to Black women and amplify their voices. I am glad to say that Ida B. Wells-Barnett, another perSISTER I celebrate (coming soon!), refused to be segregated during the great women’s suffrage procession of March 3, 1913 (organized by Alice Paul and others). She insisted on walking with her group from Chicago, even though the Illinois delegation forbade it. Ida’s resolve had to be twice as strong for her to march there, then.
Alice Paul (January 11, 1885 – July 9, 1977) was an American Quaker, suffragist, feminist, women’s rights activist, and one of the main leaders and strategists during the final rounds of the multi-generational fight for women’s right to vote in the U.S. Her militant and confrontational tactics were vital in the success of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote.
The battle for the vote was long and tangled and powered by different groups approaching the problem from different angles, while not really getting along. Alice Paul was quite literally written out of the history because the history was written by more genteel factions. Also, she didn’t like to seek attention for herself personally. Only lately has Alice been acknowledged for her vital role in this struggle. We are more ready to accept militant women now.
Alice Paul was brilliant and highly educated, earning many degrees, including a PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1910, and a doctorate in Civil Law from American University in 1928. But it was while she was in England that she gained her most life-changing education.
Basically, she learned that the human misery she had seen during her settlement house work (in the U.S.) could not be fixed through social work, because it was created by deep systems of oppression. She realized that social change required equal legal status for women. She took up with the English women’s suffrage movement and learned to Disobey: she was willing to risk physical harm while confronting powerful men at public events and then gaining public sympathy when she was beaten and hauled off to jail. It was shocking to the public to see women treated this way. She also learned to demand to be treated as a political prisoner upon arrest. Hunger strikes were another tactic, and then educating the public about the torture of forced-feeding. Alice was arrested seven times and imprisoned three times during her English sojourn. Her health damaged, she returned to the U.S. in 1910 to recover and do suffrage work back home.
In the U.S., Alice and her comrade Lucy Burns (a suffrage activist she had met in jail in England—also an American) created the National Woman’s Party (NWP) and used comparatively tamer tactics than they had in England. Their six-day-a-week silent picketing in front of the White House is their most famous activity and it turned out to be highly effective. Members of the group also suffered from police and prison brutality, culminating on November 14, 1917 in the “Night of Terror” which was a turning point in the suffrage struggle. The imprisoned women were beaten and tortured and the brutality and misogyny shocked people.
Having won passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, in 1923 Alice Paul wrote the text of the Equal Rights Amendment, which has still not become part of our constitution. Astonishingly, Alice Paul survived until 1977, well into the flowering of second wave feminism. Besides being the year that Alice died, 1977 was the year that the momentum behind ERA ratification fell apart. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1977-conference-womens-rights-split-america-two-180962174/)
DESIGN NOTE
I first became interested in Alice Paul this year (2022) when I was reading 111 Places in Women’s History in Washington DC That You Must Not Miss. The authors mention that the National Museum of American History has in its collection a charm bracelet that belonged to Alice Paul. As the states ratified the ERA, she added the state charm to her bracelet. There are actually 4 bracelets because all the states didn’t fit on one. An Ohio state charm dated 2/7/74 was the last one that she added, the 33rd, just before she suffered a stroke. Only 35 of the required 38 states ratified the ERA before the 1982 deadline. (https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search?return_all=1&edan_local=1&edan_q=alice%20paul%20bracelets&)
This struck me, how physical this token is. Then as I was learning about Alice in developing this print I saw how this gift for the physical symbol and for theater was deployed in all of Alice’s work. No other perSISTER so far has offered me so many visual elements to work with—truly a gift to archives as well. She was a master of visual rhetoric:
– The NWP flag colors are Gold, White, and Violet: Give Women the Vote (influenced by the British suffrage flag that was green, white, and violet).
– Alice made a huge NWP flag with space for 36 stars, one for each state required to ratify the 19th amendment. She would sew on a new star as states ratified. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016827559/?loclr=blogflt
– The silent picketers themselves were powerful theater, and their banners are important relics.
– The 1913 suffrage procession: the woman on the white horse, the gorgeous printed program, the floats, the insistence on marching up Pennsylvania Ave, the timing to be the day before Wilson’s inauguration.
– WOMEN driving (!) through the heartland of America asking women to sign the suffrage petition.
– There are many, many, photographs from the Alice Paul suffrage movement era.
APPROACHING TRUTH I have finally set myself to making some work for Sojourner Truth. Now, because over the course of two weeks at the Female Power hut at Eastern Market there have been at least four different people asking, Where is Sojourner Truth? One of these people was a filmmaker who made a documentary about Sojourner Truth (to be released in 2023).
Sojourner Truth was a charismatic orator whose imposing presence and way of speaking made a strong impression on those who experienced her. Remembering her meeting with Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe likened her to a sibyl, or ancient prophetess. Truth never learned to read or write, and every text we have of hers is mediated by other writers. Her power is her presence and her voice, the literal voice that disperses as sound. These factors made it hard for me to imagine how transformative she could be and I think that’s why it took me a while to turn my attention her.
The thing that fired me up is this photo I found of Truth. I could see right away that this was a creation of a master representer. She has a photo of her grandson on her lap. This is a photograph that includes a photograph, and now I have made an image out of the pixels I downloaded from the Library of Congress representing this photograph of a photograph. If you are reading this online, you are looking at pixels representing an image based on pixels representing a photograph of a photograph.
The photo of Sojourner Truth is an example of a carte de visite, or visiting card, which was handed out to acquaintances and pasted into scrap books and albums. These inexpensive photographs exploded in popularity during this time in the US. This was especially the case during the war, since so many people were separated from those they loved. The intimate photos maintained connection and presence across distances, and also through time, fixing the image of a person at a particular state. However, the photo on Truth’s lap is a more permanent and expensive one, the kind intended to last.
On her lap is a tintype or a daguerreotype of Truth’s grandson, James Caldwell, who was a soldier in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, one of two African-American regiments organized to fight for the Union during the US Civil War. Truth worked to recruit black men to fight in the war to end slavery. She was hugely proud of this grandson and she wished that she herself could fight in the war. In this photograph she is taking possession of her grandson and his acts, and re-presenting them to us.
Sojourner Truth sat for “at least twenty-eight different photographs, mostly cartes de visite, deriving from perhaps fourteen different sessions with a half dozen or so photographers,” writes Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby in Enduring Truths. And they keep turning up in personal archives. Truth printed her copyright on the back, something that was rare at the time, as usually it was the photographer who claimed the rights to an image. She also had printed at the bottom on the card, “I sell the Shadow to support the Substance.” Sojourner Truth sold images of herself to make money. She claimed ownership of her self such that she could sell representations of her self. She constructed and she controlled this representation.
In the introduction by Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith to Pictures and Progress, they write of the chapter on Sojourner Truth written by Augusta Rohrbach: “For Sojourner Truth … photography was part of a broader set of self-representational strategies she used to claim an authorized voice and an audience for her work. Augusta Rohrbach examines the ways in which the famous orator crafted her photographic portraits to signal self-possession. Rohrbach shows how Truth utilized the photograph to claim her embodied presence for an audience, a presence she also celebrated in her commitment to orality over print culture. As Truth promoted herself through print, and through the writing of others, she announced her ultimate control over those representations by marking her presence in photographs. However, as she drew upon the indexicality of the photograph to mark her presence, she also cannily manipulated the pose to produce a persona, playing with both the constructed nature of the photograph and its associations with unmediated representation. According to Rohrbach, Truth utilized a variety of representational forms to create a marketable persona over the course of her life, but her self-fashioning is most evident in her photographic portraits and her shrewd use of the photograph’s varied cultural meaning and power.”
SOMETHING SHE SAID There is a lot to say about Sojourner Truth’s most famous speech, delivered on May 29, 1851, in Akron Ohio. It is mostly transcribed in the newspaper, Anti-slavery Bugle, of June 21 (“I am a woman’s rights.”) It was changed considerably (“And a’n’t I a woman?”) by Frances Gage and published in 1882 in History of Woman Suffrage. The first transcription is thought to be the most authentic.
I was always getting stuck on the first point, when she says “I am a woman’s rights.” It just didn’t make sense to me, almost like it wasn’t really in English. How can you be “rights” since they aren’t something you are, they are something you have. They are a potential. After this statement, Truth talks about how she can do the same work as any man: she’s talking about physical labor.
It occurred to me that she may have meant “power,” which is, after all, related to rights. You likely don’t have the legitimized power to do something if you don’t have the right to do that thing. So if she’s saying, “I am a woman’s power” it makes sense that she would talk about the physical power she has, and other things, that make her as good as any man.
Furthermore, what does it mean for a Black woman, a former enslaved person, to say to a gathering of mostly white women, “I am a woman’s power”? I don’t think it means what is said in the later rewrite, that goes: “A’n’t I a woman?” That later version implies that Truth is asking to be included in the white women’s fight, to get the rights and privileges that white women have and will yet receive. That she is worthy to be included. As if they will represent her. But I propose that the first (more authentic version) implies that Truth is representing them, and their potential for strength, for power. She is presenting her self and her story to be a model for them. But I’m not sure her audience knew how to hear that. To them she becomes a magical “other,” a sibyl. Even if Truth was not saying that (how can we be sure—we weren’t there) that is what I am hearing now. That the multiply-marginalized Sojourner Truth represents the power of all women, that she is a model for me. We know how to hear that now.
Her physical presence and her speech have perished, but her autobiographical stories and her carefully constructed photographs persist. As Suzanne P. Fitch and Roseann Mandziuk write in Sojourner Truth as Orator: Wit, Story, and Song “[T]he power of Truth’s rhetoric came from her successful construction of an autobiographical character that coincided precisely with what audiences actually saw when she spoke before them. In her unadorned dress and turban, with her strong voice and haunting singing, Truth challenged audiences to consider the worth of herself and her experience. She asked them to broaden their perspectives, to mend their ways, and to be God’s servants in order to ensure justice and equality. She was not afraid to speak forthrightly and to answer a heckler with a stern admonition or to profess her faith and values through the performance of a song. In all, her narratives and her personal character blended seamlessly, such that Truth herself understood the correspondence and its persuasive force: ‘I will shake every place I go to.’ … …she entreated women to be bold and assertive: ‘Be strong women! blush not! tremble not!’ Truth often implied that if women wanted their rights, they should just take them, rather than beg men for them.”
BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE
She was born enslaved, perhaps in 1797. Her original name was Isabella Baumfree. She was born and grew up in upstate New York.
She spoke Dutch as her first language, and although she later learned to speak English, she always spoke with a Dutch accent.
She never learned to read and write.
She was probably thirteen years old when she was sold by her first enslaver in 1810 for a hundred dollars (sheep were included in the sale) and separated from her parents.
She was beaten as a slave; she also lost a portion of her right index finger in a field accident. There are implications in her accounts that she was raped while she was enslaved.
She bore five children between 1815 and 1826, one of whom died.
She walked away from her last enslaver in 1826, at the age of thirty, after completing work that she felt she owed him, although he reneged on his promise to free her after she completed the work. Her freedom, and that of her babe-in-arms, was bought by the Quaker family who were sheltering her.
She felt a call to be a preacher, and participated in religious communities and preaching circuits during a time of great religious ferment in Western New York as part of the “Second Great Awakening” in a region later called the “Burned-over district” (set ablaze with religious fervor).
She renamed herself Sojourner Truth in 1843 at the age of forty-six.
She chose to go to court three times and won all three cases. In 1828 she litigated to recover her son Peter who had been illegally sold into slavery. In 1832 she filed a slander suit. In 1865 she brought assault charges against a Washington, DC, streetcar conductor who tried to throw her off his car; he was dismissed from his job.
She wrote an autobiography with the help of two different women friends and paid for its first printing in 1850 on credit; she reissued the book in 1875, 1878, and 1881.
She campaigned on behalf of the abolition of slavery, the right of African Americans and women to vote, the right of emancipated slaves to education and property, the desegregation of streetcars, and the elimination of capital punishment.
She was a moving speaker. According to a Quaker abolitionist, she “poured forth a torrent of natural eloquence which swept everything before it.” A large part of her effectiveness was her physical presence: she was very tall and thin, and she had long bony fingers that she would point with rhetorical power. We do not have definite texts of her speeches because they appear to have been improvised, but we do have transcriptions and reports.
Her most famous speech was delivered on May 29, 1851, in Akron Ohio. It is mostly transcribed in the newspaper, Anti-slavery Bugle, of June 21 (‘I am a woman’s rights.”) It was changed considerably (“And a’n’t I a woman?”) by Frances Gage and published in 1882 in History of Woman Suffrage. This later publication has Truth’s voice rendered in a “Southern Colored” slang that is an inaccurate representation of the way Truth likely spoke.
She worked tirelessly from 1864 to 1867 on behalf of the thousands of emancipated Southern slaves refuged at the Freedmen’s Village in Washington, DC.
She filed petitions with Congress and paid to have petitions printed.
She tried to vote several times in advance of female suffrage, but was turned away from the polls.
She posed for photographic portraits, primarily cartes de visite, at least eleven different times, mostly during the years of the Civil War when she was in her late sixties, but also in the years immediately prior to her death in 1883.
She had a copyright filed in her name for her cartes de visite in 1864, which was unprecedented for a portrait sitter: usually copyrights were filed in the name of the photographer. The copyright appeared on the backs of her portraits; at the same time, she added her name and a caption to the front, “I sell the Shadow to support the Substance.” She sold her photographs at her lectures and through the mail in order to support herself.
She died at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, November 26, 1883.
SOURCES Sojourner Truth as Orator: Wit, Story, and Song (Great American Orators) by Suzanne P. Fitch, Roseann Mandziuk
Enduring Truths by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Pictures and Progress edited by Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith
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