Differences of View and Viewing the Differences: Challenging Female Traditions

Abstract

Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism is the title of bell hooks’s 1981 exploration of the position of Black women in relation to feminist thinking. The title comes from a speech delivered in 1852 at an Ohio women’s rights convention by Sojourner Truth. Sojourner Truth was a Black-American woman, born into slavery in 1797, who campaigned actively for Abolition, and for the rights of Black women. The speech was a powerful rebuke not only to white men who sought to deny women (Black and white) the vote, but also to white feminist suffrage campaigners who failed to see the Black woman as a woman like themselves. Sojourner Truth said, in response to a male de legate who had argued that women could not have equal rights because they could not participate equally in manual labour being physically weaker: Dat man ober dar say dat women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to have de best places … and ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! … I have plowed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no ma n could head me — and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it) and bear de lash as well — and ain’t I a woman? I have borne five children and seen’ em mos all sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus hear — and ain’t I a woman? (Sojourner Truth, quoted in hooks 1982, 160)