Noble: Sojourner’s truth: Ain’t I a Woman?

At the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, a former enslaved woman, Sojourner Truth, delivered a famous speech. The contents of the actual speech have been contested, with mainly two versions still reported. The more popular version is called “Ain’t I a Woman”.

That one has the narrative written by the chairperson of the meeting. It appeared that the audience, which included men, expected Sojourner to speak about abolition, but she grasped that one could not discuss the issue of rights uni-dimensionally.

Abolitionist and former slave Sojourner Truth.

A person’s qualities, hopes and yearnings cannot be easily subdivided. We try to separate the lives as though it is not a complex bundle. We reserve that right for our lives.

Sadly, we have not made as significant a progress in human rights as we should have. Maybe we do not have wise leaders like Sojourner.

Here are Sojourner’s words, as reported earlier than the popular one by the official scribe of the meeting, and today’s possible commentary:

I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman’s rights [sic]. I have as much muscle as any man and can do as much work as any man. I have ploughed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal; I can carry as much as any man and can eat as much, too if I can get it. I am strong as any man that is now.

A strong woman…

Even though today’s girls and women excel and outperform our boys and men academically and are more likely to complete higher education, there is still a gender pay gap.

Women outnumber men in every programme, except Engineering, at the St Augustine campus of The University of the West Indies. In 2019/20, two-thirds of the students were female.

Why do women represent 69% of the public service leadership but only an estimated 11% of positions at the general manager level in the private sector? Are we getting the full benefit of the higher educational achievements of our women?

Photo: The UWI/FIFA/CIES sports management class of 2019-20.
(via UWI)

As for intellect, all I can say is, if woman have a pint and man a quart—why can’t she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much—for we won’t take more than our pint’ll hold.

Women shoulder more of the unpaid care work in our homes. This responsibility can impinge on the women’s ability to maximise their full earning potential. How difficult is it to make childcare provisions for our working women, particularly those of the lower income groups? Costa Rica can do it, so why not us?

While some progress has been made, there is still the lingering fear that women employees would get pregnant, and some see this as a cost to the business. Promotions are not granted, and unequal pay endures. They are silenced.

Photo: The sexual objectifying of women at the workplace.

Sexual harassment is an occupational hazard. Educational achievement does not eliminate being targeted, even at the top end.

Shades of persistent slavery!

An enslaved woman, because of her risk of childbearing, was seen as a poor investment. Reddock (1985) quotes Gwendolyn Hall (1971) as saying the planters adjusted by pricing the enslaved women at one-third the price of enslaved men. This pricing did not consider that the women were as productive as the men.

Ghanaian captives set to be sold as slaves.

“Slavery abolished any real social distribution between males and females. The woman was expected to work just as hard; she was as indecently exposed and was punished just as severely. In the eyes of the master, she was equal to the man as long as her strength was the same as his.”

“As Francisco d’Arango y Perreneo, the father of the slave plantation system in Cuba, put it (quoted in Hall, 1971: 24): ‘During and after pregnancy, the slave is useless for several months, and her nourishment should be more abundant and better chosen. This loss of work and added expense comes out of the master’s pocket. It is he who pays for the often ineffective and always lengthy care of the newborn. As a result, female slaves cost one-third the price of male slaves’ (Hall, 1971: 26).”

The gender gap persists.

Gender inequality is common at the workplace.

Enslaved women were regarded as corrupters of the planters’ morals (Green, 2007)!

“Black women were natural prostitutes, legally inviolable as the sexual slaves of white men, and scheming seducers and corrupters of white men and morals.” Consider the inconsistencies of this position.

Think of the workplace today. The woman is blamed and fired, while the men keep their jobs or are quietly rehabilitated. She, the erstwhile descendant of Delilah, ‘seduces the helpless man’, who most often is her superior.

A female slave receives unwanted attention from her master in the movie 12 Years A Slave.

Most often, she loses long-term income. Sigh. Where is Singing Sandra when we need her?

Silencing, as the Haitian historian Michel-Rolphe Trouillot argues, is a practice from slavery. (Hall, 2010)

“Questions of silence always raise questions of memory. Who and what has been forgotten? Which peoples and events downplayed?

“There is ‘no memory without forgetfulness, no forgetfulness without memory’, and memory is a site of conflict, ‘in which many contrary forces converge and in which the interactions between memory and forgetting are contingent as much as they are systematic’.”

Photo: President of the Industrial Court, Deborah Thomas-Felix.

Will we remember Deborah Thomas-Felix and her service next month? Men are the true cowboys, complete with their gunslinger stories of conquest. The contributions of women are erased or minimised.

Women get attacked for things beyond their control. The local examples of utter disrespect meted out can take up an entire column.

The poor men seem to be all in confusion and don’t know what to do. Why children? If you have woman’s rights, give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won’t be so much trouble.

Photo: A protest for women’s rights.

Many men see women’s rights as a zero-sum situation: giving any ground to women worsens their position. Sheer folly! Women add to the competitiveness of a nation.

“Statistically speaking, the relationship between economic opportunity for women and national competitiveness is direct and positive,” Linda Scott, professor emerita of marketing at the University of Oxford, affirmed.

I can’t read, but I can hear. I have heard the Bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well, if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right.

Image: Jesus intervenes to save an adulterer from an angry mob.

When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept—and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who bore him. Man, where is your part?

Sadly, the Church is still largely bound up in gender issues that are not supported by a comprehensive understanding of the Bible. We focus on Eve and Delilah to our eternal damnation and forget Deborah and the New Testament women co-labourers. We use the Bible as a cudgel to batter women into a misguided form of submission. 

But the women are coming up blessed be God, and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place; the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.

A depiction of abolitionist Sojourner Truth.

Progress is being made; yes, there are a few male allies. But social eruption still lurks since we refuse to make adjustments to free the children of our modern-day women.

These women, like Sojourner, have to fight for their children’s freedom. For example, we criticise the women of Laventille, Enterprise and Mayaro but never lift a hand to help them. But they refuse to stop crying for justice even though we make fun of them.

Our men are in a tight place because their heads are hard and their spirits unyielding. We refuse to see the potential that can be wrought by helping women to succeed. Some men criticise any defence of our women as though it is an affront to their dignity.

Woe are we!

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