International Working Women's Day - Part One

I thought it would be a great idea to do a post each day in the week leading up to International Working Women's Day, each post celebrating an iconic woman who I thought the world should know more about. Unfortunately, I had that idea just now, so it's too late. Instead, I'm going to do a post every day for a week, starting today, on International Working Women's Day itself. This first post is on Harriet Tubman.

Harriet Tubman said, on the subject of her escape from slavery, "There was one of two things I was entitled to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other." She got her liberty, probably in part because even the Grim Reaper didn't want to fuck with her. Born into slavery in 1822, Tubman made her escape in 1849, but her own freedom wasn't enough - her family were still slaves. Working with the Underground Railroad - a secret network of free black people and white allies - Tubman made several trips back to the South to help her family escape. Though every rescue put her in mortal danger, Tubman reportedly grew more confident with every family member she led to freedom, and quickly became one of the Underground Railroad's most famous heroes. Over eleven years, in thirteen expeditions, Tubman is estimated to have helped around seventy slaves escape, leading no less a figure than Frederick Douglass to say, in a letter to Tubman:

       The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of          your heroism. Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly               encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.

John Brown, of course, was the white abolitionist who attempted to lead a slave rebellion to create a free state for escaped slaves. Harriet Tubman, being the badass that she was, helped Brown recruit escaped slaves for his army. Tubman was not present at Brown's ill-fated raid on the town of Harper's Ferry - some say she was sick with a fever, others that she was on a rescue mission in the South at the time. Whatever the reason, Tubman's absence saved her life - had she been there, she would almost certainly have been killed as Brown himself was. 

When the American Civil War broke out, Tubman came to Port Royal to serve as a nurse, but managed to find enough free time to become the first woman to lead an armed assault in the civil war. Basically, her life was a combination of Glory and Django Unchained. 

Later in life, she got involved in the women's suffrage movement, travelling around the US to make speeches in favour of women's emancipation. This post is getting a little long, so I'll end it here. Tomorrow, I'll be writing about Mary Barbour.