Racism in the Women’s Rights Movement Theme Analysis

Sojourner Truth’s landmark speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” argued for equal rights for women in the United States—but it also highlighted the racism that permeated the U.S.’s women’s right movement. The speech’s central repeated refrain, “ain’t I a woman?” implicitly references the fact that white women within the movement largely excluded Black women from the fight for equal rights. By calling attention to how U.S. society treated Black women differently from white women, Sojourner Truth argued that the women’s rights movement would not be a success until all women were allowed to participate in it equally.

Through the repeated refrain “ain’t I a woman?” Truth points out the double standards and racism that define her era’s movement for women’s rights. As Truth delivers her brief but powerful speech, she relays painful anecdotes both from her life as a formerly enslaved woman and from her present life as a free individual fighting for abolition and women’s rights. The commonality between these two different parts of Truth’s life is that she’s always excluded from being treated like a woman because of the color of her skin—and she’s always found herself frustrated and bewildered as she wonders, “ain’t I a woman?” Men pamper and coddle the white women around them, helping them into carriages and over mud-puddles—but they never do such things for Truth, failing to recognize her as a woman because she is Black. “Ain’t I a woman?” she asks rhetorically, suggesting that if men won’t recognize her as a woman, the white women they influence won’t see Truth as a woman, either.

While Truth was enslaved, she worked more than Black men who were also enslaved, suffered “the lash” the same as they did, and still managed to survive. Under slavery, she wasn’t recognized as a woman or treated with the care a woman should ideally be shown. If Truth couldn’t be recognized as a woman after suffering great pain under slavery, and she couldn’t be recognized as a woman trying to make her way in the world as a free person, only one thing was possible: her Blackness was keeping her from being seen as worthy of a place in the fight for women’s issues. Now that Truth is free, the people around her—those who work with her in the struggle for equal rights as well as those who oppose her—talk about “this thing in the head”: intellect. The implication is that because Truth is Black, people assume not only is she unworthy of the special treatment women receive in society—they also assume she is intellectually inferior to white women. But a person’s intellect, Truth points out, has nothing to do with whether they’re afforded rights.

Truth suggests that until all women, regardless of race, are recognized as women and allowed to participate in the women’s rights movement as equals, the movement as a whole will suffer. If Eve—who was just one woman—managed to topple the world through the act of original sin (i.e., introducing sin into the world by disobeying God and eating the forbidden fruit), then “these women together ought to be able to turn [the world] right side up again.” Here, Truth is implying that if one woman could forever change the world like the Bible shows that Eve did, then a whole group of women ought to be able to affect the same kind of monumental change. But because Truth has pointed out the flaws in the women’s right and called out the racism that Black women within the movement are facing, her words have a deeper implication. Truth implies that the movement isn’t yet as powerful as it could be. “These women together” at the forefront of the movement aren’t making the change they should be making, she’s implying, because they’re not really together—they’re excluding Black women from their cause and hindering their own strength.

Truth ends her speech by thanking her audience for listening to her and stating that “old Sojourner” has “nothing more to say.” Her weariness is palpable in this moment—she knows that her audience has stood there and listened to her, but she isn’t confident that they’ve really heard her. She knows that white women in the movement discount the voices and experiences of Black women—and so her departure from the stage isn’t hopeful and confident but rather exhausted and self-effacing. Sojourner’s mild tone toward the end of her speech reveals her disappointment, perhaps, with how the women’s movement has chosen to stymie itself through exclusion rather than open itself up to all women and thus greatly increase its strength and power.