Mother Tubman,” as she was called, held up above her head the firstborn 
infant of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who had given birth earlier that year, and 
presented the young Charles Barnett to the audience as “Baby of the 
Association” (Giddings 1984, 94). It was an extraordinary expression linking 
two iconic black women leading the charge against racial oppression—
antislavery in the case of Tubman and antilynching in the case of 
Wells-Barnett.
This particular story about Tubman has not been visualized in the 
artistic and popular imagination because the event situates her in the 
realist context of history—existing in a larger intergenerational community of women activists. That same convention later raised funds for 
Tubman’s travels and donated to her goal to establish a home for the sick 
and elderly, a home in Auburn that later bore her name. Despite Tubman’s 
lifelong struggle in freedom for money, support, and adequate housing 
and healthcare, the tableau of her life that has frozen in our cultural and 
national memory is her journey, her process on “the road” to freedom—the 
Underground Railroad.
Of course, Tubman herself contributed to this larger-than-life portrait. 
After attending the NACW convention, Tubman later went on to a women’s 
suffrage meeting in Rochester, New York, in November of 1896. Led onstage 
by Susan B. Anthony, the elderly Tubman declared to another appreciative 
audience how “I was the conductor on the Underground Railroad for eight 
years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say—I never ran my train off 
the track and I never lost a passenger” (Larson 2004, 276).
In crafting a narrative emphasizing her role as an Underground Railroad 
conductor, Tubman validated the struggle for women’s rights. Moreover, 
Tubman’s story reminded women that if she, a woman, could transgress the 
raced and gendered limitations that forbade women from navigating the 
world and freely crossing the borders between North and South, Canada and 
the United States—and to do so without a man’s help—if she, a woman, could 
lead a successful battle during the Civil War, then surely women deserved the 
right to vote and the rights to full citizenship. Such a complex history 
seamlessly weaves women’s rights and the rights of African Americans. 
We can only marvel, then, at the irony that Tubman often gets only 
“token” treatment in African American studies, and is altogether missing 
in women’s studies. Vivian M. May in this issue notes Tubman’s absence 
from women’s studies syllabi and scholarship, and Barbara Smith and 
Janell Hobson • Harriet Tubman 5
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, who both participated in a conversation panel at the 
centennial anniversary symposium, observe that Tubman’s absence from 
the field reveals the difficulties for mainstream feminist scholars to 
consistently engage in intersectional analysis. Because Tubman’s and the 
lives of other prominent black women reflect the intersectionality of 
multiple oppressions—and, thereby, multiple forms of resistance—they 
needlessly “fall through the cracks,” as Smith puts it. Smith further 
laments that “you have to be able to talk about race and class and gender 
simultaneously, and obviously that eludes people’s capacity.”
Significantly, Guy-Sheftall notes that Tubman’s life—as well as the lives 
of other historical women—needs to be felt more concretely in the present. 
As she suggests, “I think we need to talk about their political activism, and 
we need to talk about their courageousness and struggles, but we also need 
to talk about their everyday lives and the choices that they’ve made.” 
Considering how “inaccessible and unreachable” Tubman has become in 
historical narratives, how do we make her life journey and her life choices 
more accessible for present-day audiences?
I t