Analysis Of Ar 'N' T I A Woman? By Deborah Gray White

In the novel girls/women are looked upon as if they are in a lower class than boys/men and they can never be equal. At the age of 5, girls are taught how to carry buckets of water on their heads and how to hold the bucket with both hands. In the novel only girls had their ears pierced and had to sit down for hours getting their hair braided. Girls/women were expected to remain in the home and doing domesticated chores such as cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, and sew clothes. Girls were given tasks such as shaking and sunning bed mats and sprinkle the street in front of their cottages. In the novel boys/men are expected to do manual labor such as work in coffee patches or banana stands picking coffee beans or cutting down weeds in the fields. When boys are under the age of 6, they are given chores such as feeding the animals, letting the animals out, running errands, gather firewood, water the burros, halter the burros, and pick coffee beans. At the age of 6, boys became an apprentice under their father and learned the role of their respective job. At the age of 14, boys were considered men and got machetes to work in the coffee

What makes “Ain’t I a Woman?” worthy of reading? Its qualitative features such as the meaning and central idea, structure and organization, and the rhetorical strategies Sojourner Truth used for persuasion makes it an appropriate writing to read in an American Literature class. The purpose of Sojourner Truth’s speech is to persuade the audience that women and men should have the same rights. Students must connect ideas and examples over the entire text to understand Sojourner Truth’s argument and to infer that the central idea involves gender and racial discrimination. Because of the embedded nature of these ideas, the text is very complex.

The title of this book comes from the inspiring words spoken by Sojourner Truth at the 1851, nine years prior to the Civil War at a Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. In Deborah Grays White, Ar’n’t I a woman her aim was to enrich the knowledge of antebellum black women and culture to show an unwritten side of history of the American black woman. Being an African- American and being a woman, these are the two principle struggles thrown at the black woman during and after slavery in the United States. Efforts were made by White scholars in 1985 to have a focus on the female slave experience. Deborah Gray White explains her view by categorizing the hardships and interactions between the female slave and the environment in which the

African American women have long been stereotyped, discriminated against and generalized in this country. They have had to face both being black in America while also being a woman in America. African American women encountered and still do encounter double discrimination of both sex and race (Cuthbert, 117). Women like Elise Johnson McDougald, Marion Vera Cuthbert and Alice Dunbar-Nelson all tried to shed light on what it was like to be an African American woman living in the 20th century yet literature often portrayed them as emotional, hypersexual, unintelligent and of lesser worth. The literature highlighted that African American women have to serve both their employer and their husbands and families. They are not supposed to have an opinion or stand up for themselves, especially to a white man. ***Concluding sentence?

     Throughout United States history oppression of people has always been prominent, whether through African American’s and segregation or Asian American’s during the Vietnam War. What is often ignored is our history of the oppression of women. No matter what time in history, there is always a case to be found of the discrimination over gender. Many people know of how African American’s came into freedom and the long perilous road it took, but few know the struggles, changes and hardships that women have perceived to get where they are today. As the civil war halted and industrialization and urbanization came into play, the role of women changed dramatically and their status

On May 29, 1851, Sojourner Truth gave her most famous speech at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio. Truth, being born a slave and escaping to her freedom, was both a women’s rights activist and abolitionist. In a male-dominated society, Truth wanted to gain awareness for the inequalities of women and African Americans during the time period. She makes several claims how African Americans and women are not inferior to the white male population. By targeting those males, Truth portrays them as antagonists and thus gives the women and the African Americans something to focus their struggles on. Sojourner Truth attempts to persuade her audience to support the women’s rights movement and on subtler terms, to support the need for African

She emphasizes that the life of a slave woman is incomparable to the life of a slave man, in the sense that a woman’s sufferings are not only physical but also extremely mental and emotional. Whether or not a slave woman is beaten, starved to death, or made to work in unbearable circumstances on the fields, she suffers from and endures horrible mental torments. Unlike slave men, these women have to deal with sexual harassment from white men, most often their slave owners, as well as the loss of their children in some cases. Men often dwell on their sufferings of bodily pain and physical endurance as slaves, where as women not only deal with that but also the mental and emotional aspect of it. Men claim that their manhood and masculinity are stripped from them, but women deal with their loss of dignity and morality. Females deal with the emotional agony as mothers who lose their children or have to watch them get beaten, as well as being sexually victimized by white men who may or may not be the father of their children. For these women, their experiences seem unimaginable and are just as difficult as any physical punishment, if not more so.

This paper discusses the experiences of African American Women under slavery during the Slave Trade, their exploitation, the secrecy, the variety of tasks and positions of slave women, slave and ex-slave narratives, and significant contributions to history. Also, this paper presents the hardships African American women faced and the challenges they overcame to become equal with men in today’s society. Slavery was a destructive experience for African Americans especially women. Black women suffered doubly during the slave era.

Women gathered food in groups; they had their own societies for ceremonial activity. They raised their children together until the children were about six or seven, at which point boys generally were sent to spend time with male relatives to be taught their roles in life. Girls remained with their mothers, learning the roles that they would eventually endeavor (Finch 44).

Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman? details the grueling experiences of the African American female slaves on Southern plantations. White resented the fact that African American women were nearly invisible throughout historical text, because many historians failed to see them as important contributors to America’s social, economic, or political development (3). Despite limited historical sources, she was determined to establish the African American woman as an intricate part of American history, and thus, White first published her novel in 1985. However, the novel has since been revised to include newly revealed sources that have been worked into the novel. Ar’n’t I a Woman? presents African American females’ struggle with race and

During the antebellum South, many Africans, who were forced migrants brought to America, were there to work for white-owners of tobacco and cotton plantations, manual labor as America expanded west, and as supplemental support of their owner’s families. Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative supports the definition of slavery (in the South), discrimination (in the North), sexual gender as being influential to a slave’s role, the significant role of family support, and how the gender differences viewed and responded to life circumstances.

The time in American history where slavery was at its most popular often overlooks women, as many times in history tend to. In many depictions of women’s roles in slave owning households they are simply depicted as the mistress, the wife of the master. As far as female slaves are concerned, they are often simply lumped in with the tales of the men. I have always personally been interested in what women’s opinions truly were of slavery amongst a world filled with slave owning men who saw their slaves as nothing more than property. Did the women actually feel the same way as the men did? I also wondered how the experiences of female slaves differed from the lives of male slaves, as sometimes slavery is put together as one massive institution and fails to look at the individual lives and experiences that slaves had, particularly female ones. I wondered how the Civil War changed female perspectives on slavery and how the war changed women’s roles in the home during that time while their husbands were away. The readings for week eight about women in the slave regime allowed to view the civil war and the institution of slavery, for the first time, through the eyes of the women rather than the men.

The first time I heard “Ar'nt I a Woman?” was freshman year of high school, during our annual African-American Heritage assembly. The crowd, always restless and inattentive, chattered and snapchatted away as the speech and presenter were announced. A lanky girl shuffled on stage, folding in on herself as she walked, arrived center stage, and began to speak. As she went on, her spine straightened, her murmurs turned to phrases enunciated so clearly her tongue seemed to be working three times as hard as a normal person’s. By the end of the speech, she had the undivided attention of the audience, all holding their breath because of how passionately and honestly she presented this glimpse into life as a black woman. Both Chapter 4 of A Shining Thread of Hope by Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson, and Sojourner Truth’s “Ar'nt I a Woman?” speech serve the same general goal: showcasing the mistreatment of African American Women by society . While Truth’s speech is from her perspective, full of rage and frustration, A Shining thread gives her experiences important context. .

Almost every girl was trained from early childhood for the customary roles of the wife, mother, and housekeeper. They learned how to grind grain, how to cook and make beer, and how to spin cloth for clothing. Sometime women got a job outside of the house but it was just an expansion of her household duties. For example she might sell the beer that she had brewed that week. With childbearing came the call for a midwife usually so that was another job that women could have if you were a midwife you would create medicine that could help prevent pregnancy or terminate it.

One of the most influential writers Adrienne Rich once said, “She is afraid that her own truths are not good enough.” Adrienne Rich talks about women’s role and issues in her essay called “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying”. She describes how women during the 1977 lied about everything. They lied about their appearance, their job, their happiness, and even about their relationship. Adrienne Rich is one of the most powerful writers, who identifies herself as lesbian feminists. Her work has been acknowledged and appreciated mainly in her poems. Throughout her decades of work as a writer-activist, Rich uses essays, speeches, and conference papers, magazine, articles book reviews, and personal reflection to articulate with