As an undergraduate at Bennett College, Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens was no stranger to Harriet Tubman. One of the only historically Black liberal arts colleges for women in the United States, Bennett embraces Tubman as a mythological figure of liberation and abolition. This mythology is reinforced across the campus: Aaron Douglas’s monumental 1931 mural, Harriet Tubman, hangs in the dining hall, preserving her legacy as a larger-than-life iconoclast.
Decades later, however, Cooper Owens looks back on this approach to Harriet Tubman more critically.
While Tubman is best known as a “conductor” of the Underground Railroad, Cooper Owens is behind the latest push to recontextualize Tubman as a more “multifaceted individual.” In doing so, she challenges a referential, yet equally reductionist narrative that frames Tubman as a monolithic caricature inseparable from her role in the Civil War.
Cooper Owens argues that the abolitionist deserves a more holistic profile: one of a master strategist, medical practitioner, disability advocate, and preeminent paragon of 19th-century Black intellectualism. In doing so, she aims to provide a more thoughtful, encompassing understanding of Harriet Tubman.
Cooper Owens is an associate professor of history and African studies at the University of Connecticut and the former director of the medical humanities program at the University of Nebraska. Her book Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2017. Cooper Owens’s upcoming biography on Tubman incorporates interdisciplinary analysis, historical archives, and oral traditions to dismantle simplified folk-hero narratives and construct an intricate portrait of Tubman’s life and accomplishments.
Harriet Tubman and ‘Spiritual Cartography’
What separates Cooper Owens’s research from that of other historians arises in its focus on Tubman’s reality as a disabled woman living with a traumatic brain injury. Between the ages of twelve and fourteen, while enslaved in Maryland, Tubman suffered a catastrophic blow to the head from an iron weight thrown by a plantation overseer. The trauma left her with lifelong physical and neurological conditions, including severe migraines, insomnia, narcoleptic sleeping spells, and vivid, vision-filled “dream states.” Later in life, Tubman would undergo brain surgery without anesthesia in an attempt to alleviate her symptoms.
Rather than framing Tubman’s disability as a hindrance, Cooper Owens argues that her condition was inextricably linked to her political and tactical brilliance, and that Tubman’s dream states informed her imaginings of liberation, which helped her to craft a “spiritual cartography.”
Highlighting the importance of Tubman’s faith, Cooper Owens defines spiritual cartography as the “mutual drawing of liberatory maps based on a Protestant God-centric human relational sense of being to one’s environment.” In this regard, spiritual cartography is a deeply communal process that envisions collective futures and pathways to freedom informed by faith and nature. Navigating the 19th-century landscape with her physical realities, Tubman relied on adaptive strategies, community care, and deep resilience to carry out her liberatory work.
Furthermore, Tubman was not alone in navigating such disabilities. Cooper Owens argues that other prominent activists, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs, navigated slavery as a disabling device that placed them into a chronic state of fugitivity.
Beyond spiritual cartography, Cooper Owens contends that Tubman was shaped by her physical and social reality. Standing at under five feet tall, her status as an enslaved child positioned her on the margins. As a result, the expectation was to be silent, invisible, and pliable. An unintended consequence of this upbringing, however, was her prodigious capacity for observation and a deep understanding of how to leverage her position to move undetected through spaces of fugitivity.
Another source of knowledge was her maternal lineage; oral traditions passed down from her Asante grandmother helped Tubman to develop an encyclopedic knowledge of Eastern Shore flora. She used water lily roots, for example, to treat dysentery and quiet infants during dangerous escapes. Her medical acumen was so renowned that Union military officials deployed her to South Carolina and Virginia to serve as a nurse and eventually as a hospital supervisor. There, Tubman treated soldiers and refugees’ smallpox, dysentery, and severe combat wounds.
Leased out around age six for solitary outdoor labor like muskrat trapping and timberland navigation, Tubman also acquired an intimate understanding of the Southern environment, utilizing owl calls for covert communication, navigating dense swamps, and interpreting meteorological patterns and night skies.
Cooper Owens articulates the contrast between Tubman’s illiteracy and her strategic actions as both an abolitionist and community builder. While literacy is often considered a measure of intelligence, Cooper Owens argues that better indicators of intellectualism are strategic prowess, technical proficiency, and national renown. In each such category, Tubman was exemplary.
She stressed that Tubman’s vision of freedom extended far beyond escaping physical bondage. Following the Civil War, Tubman focused on economic self-reliance, gender justice, and community infrastructure. In South Carolina, she helped newly freed women build economic cooperatives. Later, in upstate New York, she raised funds and donated her own property to establish the John Brown Home for the Aged and Indigent, where she cared for impoverished Black elders — and where she would spend her own final years. A foundational figure in late 19th-century suffrage, she also helped launch the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) under the banner: “Lifting as we climb.”
Cooper Owens Reflects on Work, Healthcare Rights
In an interview with The Phoenix following the lecture, Cooper Owens expressed the joy she derives from “investigating a historical figure that spent more time living in freedom than in slavery.” She noted that writing from the perspective of Black women as practitioners “warms her heart,” adding that her work is for “anyone who has seen themselves on the margins.”
However, such joy is tempered by the knowledge that Harriet Tubman remained in poverty throughout her life, despite fighting a lengthy battle to receive proper compensation or a military pension for her service as a Union spy, scout, and nurse during the Civil War.
Cooper Owens spoke to the deep weariness in the fight for reproductive research, facing a government that is “recalcitrant, resistant, and determined to stray from their guiding principles of ‘do no harm.’” Additionally, as an activist for women’s liberation within the healthcare system of the U.S., Cooper Owens points to the continued disparity that Black women face in medicine. In doing so, she emphasized the urgency that constitutes the difference between life and death for so many American women, which she said is inspired by the hope that “one day the work I do will not be needed on the front lines.”
Despite this somber reflection, her message is resolute: “Remain curious, remain joyful. We are living in perilous political times that can act as the thief of joy. You are getting up to do work, not just to earn a degree, but to do work. To help human beings. The sweet spot should not be an isolationist pursuit.”
