Truth called for gender equality with the same conviction she used to battle slavery. However, Truth was disillusioned by the feminist movement of her time. Her disagreements with the women’s rights leadership of her time arose out of differences in their backgrounds and experiences. Most of the women involved in the feminist movement during her time were white, middle-class, educated, and privileged. The program that these feminists demanded failed to help African-American women and poor working women of any color, race, or ethnicity. In this sense, Truth’s feminism was more radical in that it was conceived in such a way as to apply equally to all women, regardless of their condition, past or present.
Sojourner Truth lived at a time when the society’s dominant values dictated that
African-Americans were, by definition, inferior: morally, physically, and intellectually.
Women especially were seen as inferior to men and their rights were denied for reasons very closely related to those applied to African-Americans. Here the struggle against slavery and the modern feminist movements were born, almost simultaneously. Both were struggles for equality, dignity, and self-determination. Both forced the nation to reconstruct the meaning of freedom, equality, and democracy. Sojourner Truth emerged as a great leader and an unequaled symbol for both movements.
Truth gave what is thought to be her most famous and eloquent speech, “Ar’n’t I a Woman” in which she said: Dat man ober dar say dat woman needs to be lifted ober ditches, and to have de best place every whar. Nobody eber helped 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 and 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 chilern 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?
She combined the issues of anti-slavery and feminist progress, where according to society’s way of thinking at that time, her race and color excluded her from being considered a “real woman.” Truth attacked and re-affirmed the integrity of her gender identity. As a woman, she declared that she was the equal of any man in her ability to work, bear pain and suffering, and determine her own future. As an African-American, Truth challenged the racist ideas that her people were morally and spiritually inferior to whites.
Sojourner Truth has undoubtedly earned her place among the great and courageous figures, the leaders in the struggle for equality, in United States history. Her struggle to fight for gender and racial equality provide a powerful symbol for modern freedom movements.
