Women's Studies Professor Unravels the Story of Harriet Tubman

By Kara Niemi

As schoolchildren, most of us learned that American icon Harriet Tubman rescued hundreds of African Americans from slavery. In her newly published book, Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories, Jean Humez, director of the Women’s Studies Program, discloses that the number of African Americans who journeyed with Tubman is actually about seventy. The revelation, she says, "is not at all denigrating to her legacy, it’s just establishing what really happened."

In the first major biography of Harriet Tubman to appear since 1943, Humez develops what she calls "a virtual autobiography about Harriet Tubman’s life" through a discussion of the public stories Tubman told about her life and her work with the Underground Railroad. Humez spent ten years working toward this goal.

Humez became interested in Tubman’s life story in 1993 during a women’s studies and religion fellowship at Harvard Divinity School. "Students in the course were having a really horrible time with the book by Sarah Bradford, which is the standard biography of Tubman’s life," remembers Humez. The book is written in the voice of a genteel white woman from the mid-1800s and students found the narrative distorted the facts of Tubman’s life. For example, it is not Tubman who said that she had rescued three hundred slaves, it is Bradford. The students’ resistance inspired Humez to write a biography that truly reflected Tubman’s voice.

Born into slavery around 1820, Harriet Tubman relied heavily on her spirituality throughout her childhood and after her escape to the North in 1849. Tubman was dedicated to freeing her remaining family members and made repeated trips to successfully help dozens of slaves find freedom through the Underground Railroad. Humez says that while Tubman had pious motives in her public endeavors, she also "had a practical side to make money and support the family she brought to the North."

Tubman’s inability to read or write means scholars must rely on her oral history, and Humez "wanted to find out the most authentic core story in this material." Humez’s research on rare early publications and manuscript sources, as well as on public speeches, gives fascinating glimpses into Tubman’s life. These "partial views of things we hadn’t known about her feelings" helped Humez piece together her findings in chronological order and build a more accurate portrait of Tubman.

The book, billed by its publishers as a landmark resource for scholars, is what Humez describes as "not only Tubman’s life story, but also her spiritual experience."

Anticipating that her book will be used in a classroom setting, Humez has included a comprehensive list of primary sources and key documents that will be useful to scholars.

Image: Jean Humez, director of the Women’s Studies Program, celebrates the publication of her new book, Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories, a project ten years in the making. (Photo by Harry Brett)

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