Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Reflection: And Ain't I A Woman By:Sojourner Truth

In Sojourner Truth's speech, "And Ain't I a Woman," Truth was supporting women's rights. She was talking about common arguments against women's rights.  She then goes and destroys all of those arguments by backing them up with personal experience and common sense. She was aiming her arguments at men and white women. I think the reason that she was arguing against these people is because they were the people with superiority over the African American women of the time. She wants African American women to fight together with white women for women's rights. Truth thinks that she could influence the women to all fight together for the same cause.

When she was talking about how women should be treated and how they should be lifted into carriages and over ditches, she goes to her personal experiences and says that nobody was ever there to lift her into any carriages or over any mud puddles. She then says, "And ain't I a woman (Truth)?" She is saying this because she thinks that all women should be treated the same. Just because she is an African American woman does not mean that she should not be helped into carriages.
She then goes to advocate that women can do the same quality of work that men do.  She has worked in the field and she is more than capable of working as hard if not harder than a man would. She talks about how she's had thirteen children and almost all of her children have sold into slavery. She says that she can bear the sadness and cry out, but only Jesus would listen to her because she is a woman.

This goes hand in hand with the philosophies of Thoreau because he believed that you should do what you think is right even if other people consider it as being wrong. Sojourner Truth was speaking up for women and their rights, but she knew that she was fighting a losing battle because other people considered her ideas wrong. Her ideas conflicted the ideas of others that believed that men and whites were superior to African American women.



Grant, P. B. "Individual and Society in Walden." McClinton-Temple, Jennifer ed. Encyclopedia of
Themes in Literature. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2011. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.Jan 30, 2012.

Truth, Sojourner. "And Ain't I a Woman." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 370. Print.

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