dex of an identity that she was ever-more-consciously manipulating.
It is unclear whether she attempted to correct the historical record even when it was wrong. A contemporaneous account of Truth's ability to galvanize a women's emancipation meeting appears not only to have captured Truth's symbolic resonance but also to have been actually invented by the writer of the account (Painter 167ff). In Painter's account, the picture of the woman who would eventually be seen as an authoritative social activist is balanced by evidence of a degree of chaos in her personal life that seems to have suffered in part because of slavery-enforced separation from her husband and children. Yet it was during this period that Truth dictated the autobiography and emerged, for whatever reasons, as a national figure in the antislavery movement.
The third part of the narrative deals with the multiple issue fronts that Sojourner Truth, well established as an icon of activism, navigated because of the shifting social dynamics of abolitionism, slavery, the Civil War, Emancipation, and the sometimes rival campaigns for universal and women's suffrage. In what she describes as a "coda" of the biography, Painter concludes by criticizing--and cautioning trained historians who should know better against uncritical acceptance of--the triumph of Truth in popular imagination as a symbol over the actual facts of her life and work.
Within this outline of a life that influenced the texture of 19t
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