12.4 Narrative: Expression and Insurrection
What do you do if your inner vision clashes with everything your society says you are or allows you to be? Sometimes, being true to oneself requires one to express one’s defiant vision.
In European and American cultures of the 19th Century, women’s control over their lives was restricted to a degree almost unimaginable today. Aristocratic and middle-class women were pampered and privileged, but social and legal systems severely restricted their control over their lives. Laws defined children as their fathers’ property and placed a daughter’s choice of spouse in the father’s hands. A new bride was compelled to surrender any personal wealth to her new lord and master. Women could not legally own property or run business enterprises. In emerging democratic systems, they could not vote. They were not admitted to universities and excluded from most professions.
All of this stemmed from cultural assumptions about women as weaker, more emotional, less intelligent creatures. During the 18th and 19th Centuries, however, a latent protest had been emerging to challenge these assumptions. Madame de Stael had striven to achieve feminist goals during the French Revolution (1798). Literary figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill argued forcefully against he reductive definition and role of women. In the United States, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were pioneering activists, writing articles and organizing conventions to empower women’s self-conceptions and challenge male domination.
“Ar’n’t I a Woman?”: Hearing Women’s Voices
On May 29, 1851, a women’s rights convention met in Akron, Ohio. During the Akron session, a male attendee rose to suggest that the deference accorded to the socially privileged ladies in the audience rendered a push for equal rights unnecessary. Sojourner Truth, an escaped slave and activist, rebutted the man’s complacency (Gage, April 23, 1863):
Dat man ober dar say dat women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have de best place eberywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages or ober mud-puddles, or gives me any best place.
-And ar’n’t I a woman?
Look at me. Look at my arm. I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me.
-and ar’n’t I a woman?
I could work as much as eat as much as a man, (when I could get it,) and bear de lash as well
-and ar’n’t I a woman?
I have borne thirteen chillen, and seen ’em mos’ all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard.
-and ar’n’t I a woman? …
Den dat little man in black dar, he say women can’t have as much rights as man ’cause Christ wa’n’t a woman. Whar did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him. …
Bleeged to ye for hearin’ on me, and now ole Sojourner ha’n’t got nothin’ more to say.
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| Unknown Artist. (1864). Sojourner Truth. Daguerreotype |
It should be noted that a more contemporary transcription of the speech omits some of the famous phrases, but the rhetorical logic is the same (Robinson, 1851). Truth challenges a common blind spot in the debate. Ladies enjoyed privileges which, it was claimed, compensated them for the restrictions placed on them. But working class women faced even harder conditions. They enjoyed none of the lady’s privileges while sharing severely limited life options. Besides their responsibilities to children and household, they often faced the challenge of earning a living. For most working women, the choices were few: servanthood, day labor as cleaners or washerwomen, or sex work.
For slave women, of course, things were even worse. In 1851, many activists were simultaneously working for the abolition of slavery and for remedies for women whose legal and economic rights were almost as severely restricted as were those of slaves. Sojourner Truth spoke for many victims of oppression.
References
Gage, Frances Dana. (April 23, 1863). New York Independent. The Sojourner Truth Project https://www.thesojournertruthproject.com/compare-the-speeches/
Robinson, Marius. (June 21, 1851). Transcription of Sojourner Truth’s Remarks at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio on May 29, 1851 [Article]. The Anti-Slavery Bugle. The Sojourner Truth Project https://www.thesojournertruthproject.com/compare-the-speeches/
Sojourner Truth [Daguerreotype]. (1864). Unknown Artist. Washington D.C.: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. NPG.78.207 https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.78.207?destination=edan-search/default_search%3Fedan_local%3D1%26edan_q%3DSOjourner%252BTruth