Day 4 - Truth and Cooper: A Comparison

As we saw on Day 3, the works of two highly influential writers and activists can seem quite different, but may in fact be very similar when read with a time-frame in mind. Sojourner Truth and Anne Julia Cooper are two such individuals. Both exhibit the importance of women to society with references to personal experience and religion.

Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman" speech , delivered in 1851 at a Women's Rights Convention in Ohio, was renowned in that it crossed the racial divide of the time and spoke to white and black women of the North and the South. Truth expressed a mixture of agony and requisition with statements like "Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman?...I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none by Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?"

Truth's speech was given just a couple years before Harriet Jacobs began writing Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, when the animosity between the North and South was growing every so rapidly. Her antebellum speech was much more impassioned than Anna Julia Cooper's essay, "Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race," which I will discuss now.

Cooper's essay is calculated, eloquent and much more religiously driven than Truth's message. Cooper was highly educated, having received a Ph.D. from the University of Paris, becoming only the fourth African American woman to receive a doctoral degree. She writes of how Christianity and Feudalism were the two "sources from which, perhaps, modern civilization has derived its noble and ennobling ideal of woman." On the subject of Christianity, Cooper writes that "Christ gave ideals not formulae. The Gospel is a germ requiring millennia for its growth and ripening." On the subject of Feudalism, she explains, "Chivalry, according to Bascom, was but the toning down and softening of a rough and lawless period (The Dark Ages). It gave a roseate glow to a bitter winter's day." She goes on to state that the mixture of these two "streams...is destined to be a potent force in the betterment of the world."

After delving into this history, Cooper makes the case that Negroes, since they were not involved in the merging of these two streams, were left in the dust. She then makes the conclusion that, just as women of the Dark Ages were involved in the betterment of their time, black women of today are responsible for the betterment of the Negro race. She explains, "Only the BLACK WOMAN can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.'"

Both Truth and Cooper ask the audience to recognize the merging of sexism and racism. They both draw attention to the "black woman," the pinnacle of these two vices, and they both effectively iterate the necessity of respect for women and for the colored. Because Truth wrote before the Civil War, she expressed rage and a greater sense of urgency. Cooper, on the other hand, wrote after the War, powerfully detailing a strategy which she believes black women should implement in order to alleviate modern civilization of the vice of racism.