Aint I a Woman

Sojourner Truth, was originally born with the given Isabella Baumfree. She was born in 1797, the daughter of two slaves in Ulster County, New York. She lived the first portion of her life as a slave in which she only spoke Dutch. She was later sold to another owner, it was there that she learned to speak English. She ran away from her owners and freed herself and her new born child shortly before the state of New York made slavery illegal. She eventually landed on a utopian land in Massachusetts where she became an abolitionist and a member of the women’s suffrage movement giving many different speeches about her personal experiences.  
The audience for the speech are the directly the individuals at the 1851 Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio. These people would be many of the suffragists from around the country gathering for the yearly convention that was to be held. The people in the audience may have contained a few people who didn’t believe in women’s rights and were there simply to stir up trouble, but for the most part we should believe that the convention had mostly suffragist present at the meeting.
The Occasion of the speech was the 1851 Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio. The women’s movement decided many years earlier that the conventions were the best means of advocating and spreading the ideals of the women’s movement. They decided this because they believe that organizations were inherently oppressive and they wanted to stay away from mechanisms such as those. It did ensure that common values and demands were established and refined in order to ensure the movement was unified in its thinking. It used the conventions to raise morale and consciousness about the movement itself. As long as the oppression of women were taking place the conventions were going to continue. The big debate at this time was whether women were equal to their male counterparts. This is ultimately where Sojourner Truth’s speech came into play.

II. Analysis of the Speech...