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Sojourner Truth, 19th century representative of womanism.

© Dorothy Harris

This article will focus on Sojourner Truth as a womanist, but also as a constructed icon and a symbol for African American women. I will discuss Truth's example for African American women's self expression and self identification in America. My discussion will specifically focus on Sojourner Truth's speech, "Ar'n't I a woman."

Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech for the women's convention in Akron, Ohio has become the speech that would be quoted for the century and a half thereafter. Truth's question, "Ar'n't I a woman?" or "Ain't I a woman?" becomes the question that speaks to African American women and to women of color who have found ourselves struggling for a place in women's movements for the last century and a half. Truth raises the question in reference to the need for the women's movement of her time to be inclusive of African American women, whose experiences may differ significantly from those of whites, but who are, nonetheless, women. Truth's speech raises significant issues for African American women in her time and in ours.

The myth/legend around the delivery of the speech is also very important for scholars of Sojourner truth. There were two accounts of the speech -- one by a journalist of the Anti-Slavery Bugle in June of 1851 and the other by Frances Dana Gage in The New York Tribune in 1863. In 1878, this latter version was incorporated in Truth's narrative. Because Sojourner Truth was illiterate, she was unable to record her own words. Thus, we are never to know exactly what Sojourner Truth said in this speech. We must analyze what is given, with the understanding that none of the versions are Truth's own words.

Imbedded in the versions of the speech are the attitudes of those at the convention as well as the attitudes and perceptions of the publishers of the speech. The use of strongly broken English dialect that is reserved for descriptions of poor, uneducated blacks of the south of the time, for instance, conveys messages about the attitudes and publishers perceptions of Truth. Not only is this indicative of the perceptions of Truth, but it is also indicative of the perceptions that the authors want their readers to have of Truth. So not only are they conveying their own attitudes about Truth, but they are perpetuating a particular perception as well.

In Gage's rendition, for instance, a full description of Truth is given to construct an image in the reader's mind of an unintelligent strange black woman who had the nerve to speak out in their public meeting. Despite the fact that Truth

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