Ain't I A Woman?

by Megan Ellis

"Sojourner Truth Women's Rights Speech." Sojourner Truth and Women's Rights. 25 Apr. 2014.          
     Retrieved from <http://womenshistory.about.com/od/sojournertruth/ig/Sojourner-Truth/Sojourner-Truth-
     and-Women-s-Rights.htm>

This artifact is a rendering of Sojourner Truth, captioned with a quote from her famous speech, "Aint I a Woman?" That speech, linked here at the Fordham University Modern History Sourcebook, was given at a Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851, though multiple accounts exist because no version was ever directly transcribed or recorded. In the popular version of the speech, Sojourner Truth argued that white men had no place to deny women, because as a slave she endured the same work and punishments as men and therefore deserved the same rights. Men wanted to treat women like dainty flowers, but black women had been doing hard physical labor for hundreds of years. While the term “womanism” wouldn’t be coined until over a hundred years later by Alice Walker in her work In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Truth’s speech raises valid points about including other attributes like race into discussions of gender equality, which is brought up again in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.

In the novel, Sethe believes that the death of her children is preferable to having them live in slavery, so she does what most would consider unimaginable and murders one of her children, attempting the rest before she’s caught. Sethe tries to split her identities as woman and slave in order to protect herself from the mental anguish over a mother killing her child, and others seem to encourage this behavior. Paul D remarks that Sethe’s love for Beloved is dangerous because “for a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love” (Morrison LOC 835). However, this separation is what brings Beloved into 124, forcing Sethe to confront her demons. Embracing her womanhood and, in this case, her motherhood, allows Sethe to reconcile the dichotomy of slave and woman and merge them into a more complete identity.

Bernard Bell, a research professor at Penn State, describes Beloved as a “womanist neo-slave narrative of double consciousness” that explores black women’s “terribly paradoxical circumstances as people and non-people in a social arena of white male hegemony” (Bell). This echoes not only Sethe’s conflict with identity, but Sojourner Truth’s rally against the subjugation of women caused by outdated and White-centric views. The caption above reads: “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again” (Truth).She speaks of all women working together in a universalist fashion, rather than women working independently of each other to further only their own aims.

Aspects of womanhood—as well as the double-consciousness of identity as woman and not-woman, person and not-person—run throughout the novel. As a black woman writer in the 1980’s, Toni Morrison was heavily influenced by Alice Walker and the womanist movement. Are these instances anachronistic and representative of the time period the book was written, rather than when it was set? Or, as we have seen from speakers at the time like Sojourner Truth, has intersectionality in gender equality been an issue for hundreds of years? Sethe struggles with her societal position as ex-slave and woman, and only alleviates her own guilt and turmoil by reconciling these facets into one solid identity.