“Flipping the Paradigm: Race and Gender in Sojourner Truth’s

‘Ain’t I A Woman’ Speech”

It is important to take into consideration both accounts of the speech by Sojourner Truth at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. Both possess an insight into the historical experience of our orator as woman, black and slave. While each imbued a different tone, both speak to the condition of women, but more importantly allow us to bring to light the importance of recognizing the woman in the black slave, the position of all women in society and the social hierarchy that dominated the time. In this essay, I want to look first at Truth’s version of the body, as juxtaposed to the dominant paradigm of womanhood. Second, I want to look at the way she is situated within the social hierarchy, as both black and a woman. Lastly, I will take into consideration motives of both authors of the speech and the way they situate Truth into the movement as abolitionist and woman.

In both speeches, there is an emphasis on Truth as having a body. Alison Piepmeier argues in Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America, the deliberateness on Truth’s part to “engage with the women’s rights at the most literal level, the level of the body” (92). In the Bugle version she is quoted as saying:

I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? (Truth 247).

Her emphasis here is to compare herself to men as an advocate of women’s rights. She is equalizing herself as a woman on the terms of ability. To the women present, she was viewed as almost masculine; to the men, she was a competitive force. In this period, when men were so detached from their work through the use of slaves, it is doubtful that many of the men in the audience would be able to rival her in strength. Yet, her experience greatly varied from that of the women in the audience.

It can be argued that her “presence does a great deal to undermine the notion of nineteenth-century women as domesticated beings.” (Piepmeier 93). It is doubtful that most, if not all, the women there were unable to compare themselves to her physically or in terms of labor ability. There was at the time an emphasis on white, middle class woman as mother and wife, serving their purpose in the private sphere of the home. Truth, on the other hand, came from work, and the luxury of being a housewife was unbeknownst to enslaved black women. Her emphasis on body could then in turn serve as a rebuttal to not only the men, but also to the white women who were fighting for the right to something Truth had known and been subjected to all along. Her indirectness calls into question the issue of slavery and the class issue that was facing the country at the time.

In the Gage version of the speech, the emphasis still focuses on body but there is a feminine quality added. This is done both through the addition of “a’rn’t I a woman?” as well as when she brings into the speech her ability to birth: “I have borne thirteen children and seen 'em ‘moss all sold off into slavery…” (Truth 248). Her ability to birth makes her distinctly female in spite of her abilities in strength. Her argument that “a’rn’t I a woman” serves to re-emphasize that womanhood is not as static as it was believed to be in the nineteenth century. This was a much more direct challenge to the women in the audience, compared to the Bugle version of the speech, which seems to be challenging men without bringing up the issue of slavery nearly as boldly.

With the Bugle version, the intent seems to be to lump all slaves together, with no distinction for gender. In this way they were able to divide the issue of abolition and women’s rights to serve the purpose of the Anti-Slavery Bugle. After all, being an abolitionist didn’t necessarily make you a feminist. This could be the main cause of the discrepancy between the two speeches. The Bugle was speaking from the abolitionist cause while Gage was speaking from the feminist side.

Taking this into consideration, one can clearly recognize the motive behind lines quoted in The Bugle, such as:

As for intellect, all I can say is, if woman have a pint, and man a quart—why can’t she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, —for we can’t take more than our pint’ll hold. (Gates 247).

There can be seen a sexist air to these lines, as they imply that women are inferior to men in intellect. On the other hand, Suzanne Pullon Fitch and Roseann Mandziuk argue in Sojourner Truth as Orator: Wit, Story and Song, that Truth was a master of humor and satire in her speeches.

Sojourner Truth used superiority humor to advance black people, women and herself. She placed African Americans above whites, women above men, and herself above learned people(34).

Perhaps, then, what she is doing in this piece is using humor to quell her opponents through incongruity. If one takes into consideration this theory, then we can see that Truth did not seriously consider women to be less intellectual then men, or any less worthy of rights. Instead, she is rebutting with an absurdity that was common myth at the time.

While Gage also situates Truth in the context of either slave or woman, she isn’t as non-racial as The Bugle. Erlene Stetson and Linda David state:

Both Frances Gage and the Bugle reporter wrote that Truth said that the white man was caught between the slave and the white woman; but the Bugle reporter chose a neutral nonracial expression to show the white man’s predicament, “between a hawk and a buzzard,” in preference to the more specific and more threatening position “between the negroes of the South and the women at the north all talking about rights (118).

The purpose this serves for the Bugle seems to be to not nearly as much offend the white male abolitionist constituency that reads their paper. For white men, it doesn’t seem nearly as threatening to be stuck between two inferior groups of people when they are compared to birds. Although both birds of prey, they aren’t of the same species, therefore it isn’t a united front against white men. The lack of nonracial imagery doesn’t evoke the hard reality of slavery in the south and makes the speech that much more palatable for the readers of their paper. Gage on the other hand seems to want to threaten the white male readership with a threat of impending doom by two groups that are coming together to bring their demise. She wants to invoke a sense of fear in men. Neither recognizes the gender division in the group “slave.”

Whether you lean more towards one speech of the other, it seems unarguable that “Sojourner Truth was the stuff of antislavery legend” (Gates 245). Both of her speeches beautifully articulate a need for the rights of all people, regardless of how well they fit into a dominant social definition of what it meant to be woman and human. She was a champion of equalizing people, regardless of race, class, gender or ability. The now famous title of her speech also became the “crux of her challenge as a black woman to racial and sexual stereotypes that few had the foresight to address so courageously” (246).

For this, and so much more, we have her to thank whenever a woman looks at herself compared to the social paradigm and thinks, “ain’t I a woman?”

WORKS CITED

Fitch, Suzanne Pullon and Roseann M. Mandziuk. Sojourner Truth as Orator: Wit, Story
and Song. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997.

Truth, Sojourner. "Arn't I A Woman.: Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, Ed.

The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2004.

245-249.

Piepmeier, Alison. “As Strong as Any man: Sojourner Truth’s Tall-Tale Embodiment. "
Out In Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century
America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004 .92-128.

Stetson Erlene and Linda David. Glorying in Tribulation: The Lifework of Sojourner
Truth. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994.

oh no. OH NO

we are in the final stretch of this prengancy. in ten weeks we are full term (at 37 weeks). and we are still in dire need of some things that we simply do not have the money for. we have most of the small things....toys, slings, diapers (sky's mom is getting us a diaper service for the first six months) and so on. BUT we have no clothes. we'll have to reuse caden's which some are pretty "boyish". firetrucks, sports and such. not that I bought these things, but some how they were acquired from other people who insisted on getting these things. but also, even the clothes that aren't boy themes, still look like boys clothes. button up polos and such. but what ever. i can deal with people calling her a boy. no matter what i dressed caden in people called him a girl. that never really bothered me. but the things we really need?

A double stroller for those rare times when i actually have to go out of the house with two kids under two years old....

a place for the baby to sleep. we realized with caden that he never used his crib until he was well over a year. but our bed is too big and too soft for the new baby to sleep in the bed with us. this will allow her to sleep right next to me...still co-sleeping.

and thats it. but those two things are stupid expensive. i better start working more...

flowers...

this has absolutly nothing to do with parenting or feminism...but it does have to do with my front yard. so...its valid.

i planted these wild flowers about two months ago and nothing ever seemed to happen. i saw these had blooms, but they never blossomed. then when i came home from work last night, i noticed they had all opened. by morning, they were all shut again. no idea what they are, but here they are tonight. i think they are mighty beautiful.

and just for fun...me at 27 weeks. and there, it has to do with mothering...so it's double valid.

the mother

the mother

Abortions will not let you forget.

You remember the children you got that you did not get,

The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,

The singers and workers that never handled the air.

You will never neglect or beat

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.

You will never wind up the sucking-thumb

Or scuttle off ghosts that come.

You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,

Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.

I have contracted. I have eased

My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.

I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized

Your luck

And your lives from your unfinished reach,

If I stole your births and your names,

Your straight baby tears and your games,

Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,and your deaths,

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,

Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

Though why should I whine,

Whine that the crime was other than mine?--

Since anyhow you are dead.

Or rather, or instead,

You were never made.

But that too, I am afraid,

Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?

You were born, you had body, you died.

It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you

All.

lots of people argue that perhaps this was Brooks' anti-abortion poem and some argue that it was her pro-choice version. she never really came out either way.

i've heard the sad excuse for an argument about this poem that the speaker should have stopped having sex or used birth control if she wanted to prevent the abortions....

but taken in the context of when Brook's was writing the availability of birth control was all but prohibited:

"During the first half of the 20th century, contraceptives were not widely available to women

–The Comstock Law of 1873, officially the Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, outlawed the distribution of information about birth control.
–
–The Comstock Law was particularly hard on poor women who had no means of obtaining medical advice, devices, or treatment from private physicians."

(From the History of Birth Control by Julie Oyler, MD. University of Chicago Hospitals, 2003)

In 1936 Margaret Sanger and the National Committee for Federal Legislation on Birth Control was able to win a judicial decision that exempted physcians from the Comstock Law, but it wasn't until 1965 that it was LEGAL to distribute birth control to married couples...It wasn't until the 1960's that the pill was introduced.

In terms of abortion and women's right to choose in the United States:

"The prohibition of legal abortion from the 1880s until 1973 came under the same anti-obscenity or Comstock laws that prohibited the dissemination of birth control information and services.

Many women died or suffered serious medical problems after attempting to self-induce their abortions or going to untrained practitioners who performed abortions with primitive methods or in unsanitary conditions. During this time, hospital emergency room staff treated thousands of women who either died or were suffering terrible effects of abortions provided without adequate skill and care.
Some women were able to obtain relatively safer, although still illegal, abortions from private doctors. This practice remained prevalent for the first half of the twentieth century. The rate of reported abortions then began to decline, partly because doctors faced increased scrutiny from their peers and hospital administrators concerned about the legality of their operations."

(From the National Abortion Federation http://www.prochoice.org/)

Taking all of this in to context when reading the Brooks' poem listed above, one has a very different opinion about the options available to a woman who found herself pregnant in the time when this poem was written. (1945) And before condemning the speaker to hell for having multiple abortions (the final lines read..."i loved you all") take into consideration that perhaps this poem is about not just one women, but to all the women who had to sacrafice through abortion for survival in the early part of the 20th century. much in the same way Sethe had to kill her daughter in Beloved to save her from the fate of enslavement, perhaps, these women that Brooks' refers to sacraficed their children in much the same way because they realized that the life they could offer a child was no life at all....

perhaps "the mother" is asomething greater, an all encompassing mother, for all the children that had to die because of the corrupt and brutal racism, poverty and sexism that still lives and breathes today in the United States. perhaps, Brooks' was being far more subversive and political then many have attributed her. perhaps she is directly confronting institutions that oppress women in this country...perhaps this poem is about something so much more than abortion....perhaps...

i keep forgetting

now that sky is staying home full time with the wee one, i sometimes forget what hard work it is to be a stay at home parent. all i focus on is that I work (full time), I go to school (four days a week), and then come home, to play with the kid and give sky a break from hanging with a toddler so he can do things like play video games. i catch myself wanting so badly to sleep-in every morning, that i say things like "you do nothing all day..." or "why can't you nap when he naps so i can sleep in?"

yes, i realize how terrible, horrible, mean this is...and how untrue. when i stayed home (granted i still had school), i would complain that i needed a break because staying home IS hard work. it is WORK! but how quickly it becomes a competition to see who gets to sleep later.

i appreciate more now then ever what a hard job being a parent it. its a job and on top of it, sky tends to the laundry, vacuuming, dishes, almost daily. i don't think i've done house work since his summer started. but why do i feel like i'm the one who is busy? he spends his day at parks, shopping, playing. i get the other side now (traditionally the father's point-of-view)...but i feel a terrible guilt for feeling it. i just want five minutes to myself. a day to do nothing...no school work, no work work, not toddler work. i want a day for me. but i'm sure sky wants the same thing....i say this as he plays a video game in the other room...but here is sit blogging....

In Defense of Anna Julia Cooper

This is a VERY raw piece I wrote for a class this semester.

Mothering Feminism: Dominant Womanhood in Anna Julia Cooper

Slavery produced a division between ideals of womanhood for white women and black women. The white woman was esteemed a lady: pure, pious, submissive and domestic. The African-American woman, on the other hand, was a worker, chattel, a non-woman. She was the antithesis of everything ladylike. During the nineteenth century, there was a shifting discourse on the role of women, at the very least white women, in the United States. There was a call for equal rights between men and woman: the right to vote, the right to education and the right to work outside the home. While the former two were unknown to all women, the latter was a “right” all too familiar to African-American women. This call for equality could extend only so far as the women with white skin when it came to working outside of the home. Some African-American women had different ideas of the rights of women.

In Anna Julia Cooper’s essay, “Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race,” her argument calls for the occupation of the position of lady by black women. While some may argue that Cooper is simply submitting to the dominant patriarchal paradigm of womanhood that called for a woman to be mother and wife first and foremost, her assertion is rather forward thinking for a race of woman that had never been afforded that right before. Her call for the recognition of black women as woman and lady is revolutionary in and of itself. I want to look briefly at the ways in which Cooper’s essay calls for a radical womanhood by challenging the ideals of womanhood that didn’t extend past white women at the time. Although it may seem that she is simply conforming to an oppressive definition of womanhood, she is in fact, challenging what it meant to be a black woman in the United States.

Up until this point in history the African American woman had been slave, chattel, worker, birthing machine, and whipping post. She had no right to her children, no right to marry and no right to her own home, only to the preservation of her master’s home. While white women were coveted as mother figures, wives and home keepers, black women were denied these very privileges through a dehumanization of their self. When slavery was finally abolished, African American women were faced with the challenge of deciding what defined a black woman. Cooper’s definition is hugely feminist if you consider the conditions that women of her race had previously endured in the shackles of slavery. Cooper was calling for a radical equality for black women to the highest of all white women: the right to be a lady. In her essay, “The Five Million Women of My Race: Negotiations of Gender in W.E.B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper,” Hanna Wallinger states, “Cooper firmly subscribes to the Victorian view of woman as the morally superior being” (272). It is no surprise that Cooper looked to this ideal of womanhood when defining what a black woman should aspire to. White woman of the era, arguing for women’s rights were doing the exact same thing when they looked to the ideal of manhood as the model to strive for in their struggle for equality with men.

Cooper believes firmly in the right of women to raise their children. Throughout the antebellum era, slave women were robbed of their children in an attempt to break them as well as to relieve them of any hope. Her belief that the definition of mother is intrinsically intertwined with the meaning of woman, is critical to an understanding of her feminism. In her essay, Cooper states:

Woman, Mother, —your responsibility is one that might make angles tremble and fear to take hold! To trifle with it, to ignore or misuse it, is to treat lightly the most sacred and solemn trust ever confided by God to human kind. The training of children is a task on which an infinity of weal or woe depends.(641)

This argument attacks the institution of slavery in that it denied African American women their right to womanhood through a denial of their motherhood, in the refusal of the right to raise their own children. While this may seem to some scholars to prescribe to an oppressive discourse on womanhood, in reality, it directly attacks the brutal practice of denying slave women their children.

Modern feminist scholarship likes to criticize Cooper for the irony in failing to recognize her ideas of equality as nearly as oppressive as the slave conditions she previously lived under. Elizabeth West argues that “while Cooper’s assertions of sexual equality signify her resistance to the male dominated rhetoric of the late-nineteenth-century America, her repeated acquiescence to a discourse that ties womanhood to domesticity ironically ties her more firmly to the patriarchal ideals that she attempts to overturn” (84-5). While West does recognize Cooper as fighting for women’s equality, she fails to recognize her as radical when arguing for a right that had thus far been denied to African American women in the United States. West can not see past the white middle class definition of womanhood as oppressive only to those women it had previously been accorded. She fails to recognize the assumptions made by Cooper along race and class lines that afford these rights to women regardless of “rank, wealth, or culture” (Cooper 638).

Although in modern discourse we may look at Cooper’s argument for black women’s rights as falling under the same patriarchal notions of womanhood that white women sought to free themselves, this argument is fundamentally flawed in that it fails to recognize the division between the previous definitions of woman that fell along the color line. One must consider the radical notion that Cooper asserted when she called for the right to be a woman, a lady, in a time when a black woman was considered neither. Her assertion is equally as radical as white women’s call for equality with men. Some may argue that “her male audience is not disturbed by her affirmation of woman’s central role in nation building, because while woman may be hoisted onto an ideological pedestal, she is there unempowered” (West 83). And it may be true that her call for this type of womanhood wasn’t disturbing to men in the era, but it wasn’t a direct challenge to manhood that Cooper was emphasizing. Her call for an ideal of womanhood that enveloped all women was far more challenging to the position of white women. Her race and class politics were at the forefront of her argument. It is for this that she is truly radical.

WORKS CITED

Cooper, Anna Julia. “Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Eds. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Norton and Company, 2004. 636-650.

Wallinger, Hanna. “The Five Million Women of My Race: Negotiations of Gender in W.E.B. Dubois and Anna Julia Cooper.” Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition. Ed. Karen L. Kilcup. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,1999.262-280.

West, Elizabeth. “Cooper and Crummel: Dialogics of Race and Womanhood.” Rhetorical Women: Roles and Representations. Eds. Hildy Miller and Lillian Bridwell-Bowles. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. 81-102.

seven seven seven

what we did on the luckiest day of the year!

yet ANOTHER post for today. my uncles had their 52nd birthday today. here are some pictures from the event... this was on the way to the event. (*above and below*) we stopped to pick up a side dish...

caden doing what caden does most. playing ball. i think his face here is priceless....so is hers. this is his cousin once removed? my cousin's daughter. thats easier. she is about four. they LOVE each other when they get to see one another.

he just wanted to sit in her lap so bad. then they would both fall backwards...repeat...over and over again...

and this is all three great-grandchildren. the two on the left are sisters. then there is caden and soon there will be four...
and just because she is so darn cute. this is caden's girlfriend, zelda. by far his best friend in the WHOLE WIDE WORLD. the really do love one another.

moving along

today i am officially 26 weeks pregnant. this is two nights ago:





i'm feel so much bigger this time then i did with caden at about the same point. this was july 13th 2005. i would have been about 25 weeks at the time.


OKAY!! Maybe there isn't that big of a difference. but darn, it sure feels like it.

she is such an active little monkey in there. she moves about and kicks me all the time. i think she is going to be EXACTLY like her brother.

he is already so cute with her. every morning he tells my belly "hi baby..." then gives it a kiss. he can already say her name and does all the time. then he gives me a big fat zerbert on my belly and laughs. today he sat on my lap with his hand on my tummy trying to feel her kick. i doubt he has any idea why his hand is there...but its darn cute to imagine...

this pregnancy is soooo different from caden's. i don't have nearly the time to dwell on it that i did because i obviously now have caden running around to worry about. i feel so bad for not taking nearly as many belly pics, not writing nearly as often in the journal, etc. am i shorting her already? and i don't feel nearly as connected this time. i don't read to my belly or play her music through ear phones. but i just wonder this time if it was really beneficial the first time or something niave first time parents do to ensure they are "perfect"... now that i have caden, i feel like i've learned so much and i just don't know. something to ponder.

In honor of a "black lesbian, mother, warrior, poet"

In honor of Audre Lorde.


there are a couple of purposes to this blog. i want to use it to examine the intersecting identities in my life. what it means to be mother...feminist...student...woman...writer...teacher...all at the same time. how do i work within the confines of my identities, and how i break free from them. what it means to live at the intersection of the identities. lorde was constantly exploring her intersections. her theories of identity are quintessential for a succesful feminist movement. we must refuse to limit ourselves to either/or when we are all of the above. and this is my intent here. i want to explore what struggles i've come across. the way motherhood has changed me, for the better, or the worst. the ways in which i live daily encompassing all of the me's that exist. but i'll also use this blog to update about caden and baby elliot (on the way). i'll use it for random musings, pictures, scholarly writings i do on motherhood, and other conjectures not of the scholarly type. feel free to look around. feel free to comment. feel free to not. use it as you will...i certainly plan to.

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive. ~~~Audre Lorde

a mother is born

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new. ~Rajneesh



And there I was, a mother. And here I am ready to become one once again...I'm not sure you can become a mother twice in your life, only that you can have more children. So I find myself, not quite two years after the first, ready to have another child.