Aren't/Ain't I a Woman

Simone Sutton

9/ /09

AP English III

“Aren’t/Ain’t I a Woman”

Sojourner Truth was a slave who became emancipated in 1827. She became an advocate for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. She gave this speech which was titled “Aren’t I a woman” and it was very powerful. “… Aren’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm!..., I have plowed, and gathered into barns and no man could heed me- and aren’t I a woman.” She makes the point that women are powerful, using herself as an example. She is even stronger than mist men. Men believed that women needed help with everything, but she was a woman right. And nobody ever helped her with anything.

People during this time probably believed that being a slave makes you not a person. But she gave birth to thirteen children like any white woman could, and she was strong enough to plow fields and take beatings like a man. She obviously believed that men and women should be equals.

She also questioned what intelligence had to do with rights. During this time white men believed that they were smarter that women and slaves, and white women believed that were at least smarter than Africans. It was a totem pole like this that made up the social hierarchy of the eighteen hundreds. Sojourner Truth realized the wrongness in this idea because she was directly at the bottom.

Christianity was the dominant religion of this time and people would find excuses in the bible to justify their treatment of women. Like how they used the story of Cain and Abel to justify enslaving people with dark skin. And here, “That little man in black there, he says that woman can’t have as much rights a man ‘cause Christ wasn’t a woman” , just because Jesus was a man that makes all men important, or even because Jesus wasn’t a woman that all women were unimportant. Truth responds with” Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man has nothing to do with him”. Women had a larger role in bringing Jesus Christ; Men probably had a larger role in killing him. This quote could be used to suggest that women are superior to men, but Truth doesn’t want it that way, she just wants equality. “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside-down, these together ought to be able to turn it back”. This lone means the women are stronger than any one will ever know and, that even God underestimated us and, that our influence is just as important, if not more, than men’s.

Years after Sojourner Truth gave her speech, Frances Gage re-published her speech but with one major difference. It was rewritten with a Black/Ghetto dialect. And a debate between whether this was written by Truth or the first one is Truly Truth’s words. The Frances Gage version makes Truth seem a little less educated than the first version. From what we know Gage is a white woman and when her version is published racism is still going strong, so for all we know, she wrote this version to make fun of a black woman.

But considering that Sojourner Truth was a slave she might not have had a good education that is suggested by the first version. But Truth was a smart woman she could have taught herself or learned from other people, the kind of grammar that is suggested by the first version of the speech. And if the First Version of the speech is the one that is edited why would someone so that. Racism was a much stronger idea back then because they had just begun to reluctantly free the slaves. No one with grammar like that would want to make this women seem smarter.

I believe that the first version of the speech is the true speech, from the mouth of Sojourner Truth.