Sojourner Truth A 'N' T I A Woman Summary

Similarly racism and classism were, and still are, justified with these ideas. It argues that peoples who were poor, marginalized or otherwise subjugated either legally or socially, were in fact lesser than those who were wealthy, and otherwise privileged. It argues that their privilege arose from them being better suited to fitting in and thriving within the society, and that those at the bottom of society are there because they are not suited to be at the top. This was a way of using science to justify prejudices that were already in place so as to appease the consciousness of those societies. These ideas enforced, segregation and marginalization of “lesser” members of society. Though this works in theory, it does in fact explain why some
For example, in her address to the US Women’s Convention, “A’n’t I a Woman”, Sojourner Truth fights against the axioms used to define “woman.” In her speech she addresses not only what men say women should have, but also what women are capable of and then, using herself as an example, points out that these are not definitions that fit. She calls out that despite the fact that “women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere” (Truth 219), these have not been things that have been extended to her. She goes on to talk of how she can work and eat as much as any man and calls out the ideas that women are fragile, inept creatures. She is utilizing the logical structure of the times to point out a flaw in the structures that came about from that logic, among other things. It can not be so that women are weak and inept if she herself is an example of a woman who works as hard as a man. If women are so incapable of getting out of carriages themselves, or getting through mud puddles, etc., then why is it she has made it all these years without anyone to help her. She argues that there is no logical reason why women’s rights and ability to vote should be limited, being that there is a flaw in the logic that lead to the conclusion that they were incapable. This is a direct challenge of the system that
This definition may be limited only to modernity as it was experienced by European countries and Northern America; this is because there are, in fact, multiple possible modernities because the overarching characteristics and defining features of modernity were different for different peoples and locations. While this is a Eurocentric definition of modernity that fails to account for the perspectives of other peoples, it does, at least account for the impermissible actions of the European countries, and later the United States of America towards other countries and their own peoples and represents the governing principles that guided this behavior, which, in many ways, dominated and created the world as we know it today. There were, throughout this class, simply not enough resources to adequately create a definition or explain the perspective and experience of modernity from other individual cultures without lumping them into a collective “Not Western” or by speaking of them in relation to the modernity experienced by Europeans. This is not appropriate or accurate because, though many other countries modern experiences were highly shaped by invading Europeans and Northern Americans, it is inaccurate to define these countries’ modernities only in relation to the Eurocentric model and limit primary source work to texts that deal, almost exclusively, with European