Black Women and Feminism

Abstract

Abstract More than a hundred years have passed since the day Sojourner Truth stood before an assembled body of white women and men at an anti-slavery rally in Indiana and bared her breasts to prove that she was indeed a woman. To Sojourner, who had traveled the long road from slavery w freedom, the baring of her breasts was a small matter. She faced her audience Witham fear, without shame, proud of having been born black and female. Yet the white man who yelled at Sojourner, ‘I don’t believe you really are a woman,’ unwittingly voiced America’s contempt and disrespect for black womanhood. In the eyes of the 19th century white public, the black female was a creature unworthy of the title woman; she was mere chattel, a thing, an animal. when Sojourner Truth stood before the second annual convention of the women’s rights movement in Akron, Ohio, in 18;2, white women who deemed it unfitting that a black woman should speak on a public platform in their presence screamed: ‘Don’t let her speak! Don’t let her speak! Don’t let her speak!’ Sojourner endured their protests and became one of the first feminists to call their attention to the lot of the black slave woman who, compelled by circumstance to labor alongside black men. was a living embodiment of the truth that women could be the work-equals of men.

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