And Ain't I a Woman?

“And Ain’t I a Woman?” is a very witty and to the point speech that was given by Sojourner Truth at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851. In it, she makes many good points that are helpful in the arguments for having both rights for blacks and rights for women, and the way she does this makes it fun to listen to her and also keeps it simple so that most any audience can see what she is trying to say. It is this down to earth attitude throughout the speech and its pertinence to the original audience that group it as a piece of Realist literature with some Regionalism because of her dialect.

This dialect is very obvious in its origins to anyone who knows anything about Sojourner Truth. It stems from the fact that she was an escaped slave and adopted the dialect of most Southerners, white and black alike. You can recognize the dialect when she uses words such as “ain’t” and “honey,” when addressing someone, and also when she shortens words such as “because” into simply “’cause” (Truth 370). Lots of public speakers in today’s modern society choose to adopt a different dialect, usually the standard “Midwestern” accent, in order to conform to a more normal sounding crowd, but Sojourner Truth proudly displays her heritage through her speech, thus making her part Regionalist.

The Realism in her speech, though, comes from the subject matter itself. She was indeed talking to a group of people at a women’s rights convention in Ohio about what another speaker, a man, presumably a preacher, was saying to the crowd against women’s rights. She says that he claimed that women need to be taken care of and helped into carriages and over mud puddles and things similar to that (Truth 370). She retorts that nobody ever does any of these things for her, even though she is a woman. She then also says that he says that women can’t have rights because Christ was not a woman, to which she replies that Christ came from God and a woman, and that men had nothing to do with him (Truth 370). She also encourages the women by saying, “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again” (Truth 370).

The reason these things make her speech Realistic is because they are extremely pertinent to her audience. She speaks about women’s rights, and why women should have rights, but she is not speaking to a room full of conservative men. She is speaking to a crowd of mainly women at a women’s rights convention who are looking for arguments to use in favor of their cause, and she gives these arguments to them. Realism is all about things pertaining to the current situation or literature and art that activates social change, and this is just what Sojourner Truth’s speech does. Therefore, it is entirely appropriate and right to name her a Realist.

Works Cited

Truth, Sojourner. "And Ain't I a Woman?" GlencoeLiterature. Ed. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill, 2009. 370. Print.