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Sojourner Truth gave what famously becameknown as her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech.Sojourner’s passionate call to right the injusticesvisited upon the supposed weaker sex in thename of protecting it (“Look at me! Look at myarm! I have ploughed and planted, and gatheredinto barns, and no man could head me! Andain’t I a woman?”) must have stirred Caroline’ssoul. She subsequently attended women’s rightsconferences in Ohio, Indiana, and New York,where she listened to speeches, helped to passresolutions, and deliberated on strategies for winningthe support of the press, the pulpit, and thepolitical establishment for women’s suffrage andequal property rights. 18As the majority of Cleveland’s women ofmeans—the “primitive 400,” Caroline later calledthem—remained preoccupied with less weightymatters, Caroline gained recognition as the city’spreeminent women’s rights proponent. Mrs. Severancemay have lacked the stereotypical femininecharms (biographers describe her as “severeof countenance, caring nothing for fashion, neitherwitty, brilliant, nor very rich”), but she was anatural leader. 19In 1853, Cleveland’s Mercantile Library Association,a forum for the most prominent publicspeakers of the day, invited Caroline to delivera lecture on women’s rights. The organizationhad never before offered its podium to a female.Possessed of a lifelong fear of public speakingshe attributed to a childhood anxiety that anutterance could doom her to eternal punishment,Caroline initially pleaded her unfitness forthe assignment, but her sense of duty won outand she set about to write the “most exhaustiveessay I could . . . , to make sure, for once, thatmy city should have all that could be said on thesubject.” Her talk, “Humanity, A Definition witha Plea,” caused a “great sensation,” igniting passionsboth pro and con. Its central thesis, shelater explained, was that the state had a duty to“take the mother from the category of the alien,the criminal, and the lunatic, and place her . . . asan equal partner” of her husband and of her son,“the two who sit beside her hearth.” 20Caroline’s supporters in the audience presentedher with a handsome bound set of the completeworks of William Shakespeare as a mementoof her accomplishment, and she quickly foundherself in great demand as a lecturer. She presentedversions of “Humanity” before generalaudiences, women’s rights conferences, and eventhe Ohio Senate. Both she and T.C. were electedofficers of the fourth national women’s rightsconvention, held in Cleveland’s Melodeon Hallin 1854. There they and fifteen hundred otherattendees debated with movement leaders LucretiaMott and former Oberlin College studentsLucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell (thefirst American woman to be ordained a minister)the merits of such radical reforms as the rightof women to divorce alcoholic husbands andthe right of women to receive tax exemptionsuntil such time as their gender was awardedsuffrage. Cleveland—and the nation—remainedunmoved. 21Caroline later identified the event that finallysealed her decision to leave Ohio: the gatheringof Clevelanders in the city’s parks and publicspaces to await the second coming of Christ,which had been predicted by New York Statefarmer and self-appointed biblical scholar WilliamMiller. Or at least this was the reason shegave for uprooting the family to Boston, accordingto her son Mark Sibley Severance, whohimself never forgot the sight of a family of Millerites,sitting astride or holding on to the tail oftheir old white plow horse, ready for their ascentto heaven. Fearing that “this Millerite movementmight be demoralizing and at any rate fearingthe influence of the City of Cleveland on heryoung children . . . ,” Mark explained in his autobiography,“Mother and Father decided to take usall to Boston to be educated.” 227