Ain't I a Woman?

Ain't I a Woman?

"Ain't I A Woman?" is a speech by Sojourner Truth, delivered in 1851 at the Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio. It pointed out that, while antebellum culture often placed white women upon a pedestal and gave them certain privileges (most notably that of not working), this attitude was not extended to black women. The speech was delivered in response to racially biased comments made by a male speaker. Sojourner Truth's criticism was not generally accepted at the convention.

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Text of the speech, courtesy of Wikibooks

Ain't I a Woman? is quoted as the title of a book by bell hooks, the full title being Ain't I a Woman: Black women and feminism (1981) ISBN 089608129X. hooks examines the effect of racism and sexism on black women, the civil rights movement, and feminist movements from suffrage to the seventies. She argues that the convergance of sexism and racism during slavery contributed to black women having the lowest status and worst conditions of any group in American society. White female abolitionists and suffragists were often more comfortable with black male abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, while southern segregationalists and stereotypes of black female promiscuity and immorality caused protests whenever black women spoke. Hooks points out that these white female reformers where more concerned with white morality than the conditions these morals caused black americans.

Further, she argues that the stereotypes that were set during slavery still affect black women today. She argues that slaverly allowed white society to stereotype white women as the pure goddess virgin and move black women to the seductive whore stereotype formerly placed on all women. This has allowed the justification of the devaluation of black feminity and rape which continues to this day. The work which black women have been forced to perform, either in slavery or in a discriminatory work place, that would be non-gender conforming for white women has been used against black women as a proof of their emasculating behaviour. Since black nationalism was largely a patriarchical misogynist movement that sought to overcome racial divisions by strengthening sexist ones, it readily latched onto the idea of the emasculating black matriarch proposed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and repeatedly criticised by hooks.

Meanwhile, the "feminist movement", a largely white middle and upper class affair, did not articulate the needs of poor and non-white women, thus reinforcing sexism, racism, and classism. She says this explains the low numbers of black women who participated in the feminist movement in the seventies, especially since a Louis Harris Virginia Slims poll done in 1972 show 62 percent of black women supported efforts to change women's status and 67 percent sympathized with the women's rights movement, compared with 45 and 35 percent of white women.