Themes
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”).
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.
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.
This passage introduces the speech’s central refrain: the question “And ain’t I a woman?” As Truth tells her audience about men who claim to revere, elevate, and help women, she exposes the hypocrisy behind their actions. It’s easy enough to help a woman into a carriage—but these men shouldn’t claim that they want the “best place everywhere” for women when they won’t help the women’s rights movement gain any real traction. What’s more, Truth’s question—“ain’t I a woman?”—reveals the racism in the burgeoning American feminist movement. Men never help Truth (or even acknowledge her) because she’s Black. She implies that her Blackness erases her womanhood in the eyes of these hypocritical and paternalistic men. As the speech goes on, Truth will continue to give examples of how men (and other women) exclude her—and, by extension, all Black women—from any conversations about what women deserve.
Themes
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?”
Here, Truth recounts her most torturous experiences, showing her audience that her womanhood—which, according to certain white men, should mean she gets the “best place everywhere—didn’t protect her from the brutality of slavery. She was expected to work just as hard as the men around her and suffer the same physical punishments and emotional cruelties that they did. The implication here is that men shouldn’t get to determine what privileges womanhood should confer upon a woman. It should be up to women themselves, she’s suggesting, to decide how they should be treated and what place they should have in society.
Themes
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Truth states that she has given birth to thirteen children—and of those thirteen, she has “seen most all” sold into slavery. She has cried out with a mother’s grief, and no one but Jesus Christ has heard her. “And ain’t I a woman?” she asks.
Here, Truth begins invoking her Christian faith, and the comfort she found in times of trouble through Christ. It’s also one of the speech’s most controversial moments, since historians have refuted the idea that Truth had thirteen children—she only had five, and Frances Gage (the white feminist who transcribed the version of Truth’s speech that’s now in circulation) likely edited Truth’s words. Thirteen is considered a very lucky (or very unlucky) number across several religions and cultures. One of the most notable instances in which thirteen appears in a religious text is in the New Testament, during the story of the Last Supper. Christ’s final meal with his twelve apostles before his Crucifixion saw a total of thirteen people gather around the table. So Truth’s “thirteen children” can be seen as a symbol of her own Christ-like suffering during slavery. Though Truth suffered tremendously as she lost her children (and, according to the historical record, she was forced to watch as one of her children was sold to a slaveholding family in Alabama), no one comforted her. Again, Truth’s womanhood afforded her no special care or treatment. The only person who heard her cries was Christ himself.
Themes
“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?”
Here, Truth points out one of the primary arguments that men of her time use to sideline women and Black people from society and ensure they don’t attain equal rights. By arguing that women and Black people were of inferior intellect, white men in the U.S. were able to hoard power for themselves and discount any bid that women or Black people made for equality. Truth is using white men’s own argument against them here, taking for granted—just for the moment—the idea that they’re right, and that white men are of superior intellect. Even if this is the case, though, intellect shouldn’t have any bearing on whether a person can have equal rights. All Truth and her fellow women are asking for, she’s saying, is a ”pint” of power—and yet men won’t dip into their own large “quart” to offer them some. Truth is pointing out the hypocrisy in the arguments that white men make against legislation that will abolish slavery and provide equal rights for women and Black people.
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.
In this passage, Truth reflects on the hypocrisy, cruelty, and exclusion in the Christian Church in the U.S. The “little man in black” isn’t one specific man; instead, Truth is referring more broadly to the Church, given that clergymen traditionally wear black garments. These men, Truth suggests, are corrupting religious doctrine and twisting its meaning for the purpose of justifying the exclusion and oppression of women. Christ wasn’t a woman, so men in positions of power within the Church use Christ’s image to justify their exclusion of women. But Truth turns that argument upside down, here, suggesting that it’s men who have nothing to do with Christ—since Christ was created by the union of a woman (Mary) and God himself.
Themes
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.
White men across the U.S. and clergymen within the Christian Church claim that women are weak and must be protected—so they shouldn’t have the right to vote, and they shouldn’t participate in public life. But in this passage, Truth is suggesting that if one woman—the biblical figure of Eve—could change the world forever, then certainly a large group of women with the same collective purpose should have no problem securing their goals. But men are using their power to sideline the women’s movement—and, in Truth’s view, this has to stop. The figure of Eve is still, to this day, often used to claim that women are responsible for original sin or that they are inherently weak-willed—but in Truth’s interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve, Eve is the very image of strength, action, strong-willed capability: exactly what the women’s rights movement needs.
Themes
Referring to herself as “old Sojourner,” Truth thanks her audience for listening to her, then states that she has “nothing more to say.”
As Truth concludes her speech, her language becomes weary rather than fiery. She calls herself “old Sojourner,” implying that she’s exhausted from her travels and from her fruitless attempts to secure equality for women and Black people in the eyes of the law and the Church. No matter how fired up she gets about the equality women deserve, the need for abolition, or the corruption and hypocrisy within the U.S.’s social, political, and religious institutions, no change really happens. So Truth is using her weariness and frustration to show her audience that it’s time for immediate change.
Themes
