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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Ain’t I a Woman?, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism in the Women’s Rights Movement
Men, Paternalism, and Hypocrisy
Christianity as an Excuse for Oppression
Summary
Analysis
Addressing her audience at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, as “children,” Black abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth begins her speech. “When there is so much racket,” she says, “there must be something out of kilter.”
When Sojourner Truth stepped onto the stage at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, she was already well-known as a prominent abolitionist and feminist speaker. After a religious awakening years before, Truth—who was born Isabella Baumfree—gave herself a new name that spoke to her need to journey the U.S. in order to speak her truth and share her stories of enslavement, liberation, and salvation through her religion. So Truth was able to command a room—and her decision to address her audience as “children” shows that she had a lesson she wanted to teach her listeners. The “racket” she’s referring to here references the discord surrounding the women’s rights movement, as well as the racism and tumult within the movement (the things that are “out of kilter”).
Active
Themes
Both the “Negroes of the South” and the women of the North are “talking about rights.” Because of this, Truth predicts, the white men of America will soon “be in a fix.” And yet Truth herself is still unsure about what the core of “all this here talking” is aimed toward.
Truth points out that women and Black people are still only “talking about rights”—meaning that they’re unable to find the social support they need to secure those rights. And the reason they can’t find social support, she’s implying, is because women’s and Black people’s equality would detract from white men’s power in the U.S. This would place white men in a “fix”—and so in Truth’s estimation, white men haven’t adequately supported the abolitionist movement or the feminist movement. “All this here talking,” then, is exhausting Truth and others who are sick of begging for recognition and equality from people who are threatened by their desire for equal rights.
Active
Themes
Some men say that women need to be helped into carriages and over ditches—women, these men say, should “have the best place everywhere.” But Sojourner Truth, a Black woman, says that she never gets helped into carriages—no one gives her the “best place,” ever. “And ain’t I a woman?” she asks her audience.
Truth urges her audience to look at her carefully. “Look at my arm!” she says, urging them to see that as a formerly enslaved person, she has ploughed and planted and raised barns. No man, she says, can compete with her. She asks again, “ain’t I a woman?” While enslaved, she could work as much as a man and eat as much as one, too—and she could “bear the lash as well” as a man could. Again, Truth repeats, “And ain’t I a woman?”
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Themes
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“They talk,” Truth states, about “this thing in the head.” She asks her audience what the thing in the head is called—and a member of the audience replies, “intellect.” Truth tells the individual that they’re right—and that intellect has nothing to do with women’s rights or “Negroes’ rights”. “If my cup won’t hold but a pint,” she asks, “and yours a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?”
Active
Themes
A “little man in black”—ostensibly a preacher or reverend—is always saying that women can’t have the same rights as men because Christ was not a woman. But now, Truth asks her audience rhetorically where Christ came from. The answer, she says, is “from God and a woman”—man himself had nothing to do with the creation of Christ.
The first woman that God ever made—Eve—was, in Truth’s estimation, strong enough to “turn the world upside down” all on her own. Therefore, the women fighting for equal rights today should be able, together, to “get it right side up again.” These women are asking to change things, and men should let them.
Referring to herself as “old Sojourner,” Truth thanks her audience for listening to her, then states that she has “nothing more to say.”
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