Sufferage

Sojourner Truth became actively involved in the fight to obtain rights for all women, colored and white. Her famous speech, "Ain't I a Woman?" still stands as a question, not only for the rights of women, but as a statement of inequality between the treatement of white and colored women. In the 19th century gender roles were specific and ridgid, women were the homemakers and men were the breadwinners. All things were controlled and operated by white men. According to Hazel Dicken-Garcia and Kathryn M. Neal in their article "Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Cult of True Womanhood," "A woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors, and society at large by four cardinal cirtues-pietry, purity, submissiveness, and domestic-superior to men," (Dicken-Garcia and Neal 179). Dicken-Garcia and Neal go on to comment on the social differences between white and colored women. They write that colored women not only faced the challenge of rearing their familes, but had to deal with oppressive laws, white hosility, and the difficulties of maintaing a normal family relations in the midst of a slave society (Dicken-Garcia and Neal 179). They go on to say that "Many free women of color were foced to flee the South during the late antebellum period as they became increasingly culnerable to resticitive new laws, intensifying racial hosility, and competition for skilled and semi-skilled jobs," (Dicken-Garcia and Neal 179). In the 19th century racial and gender inequailty was just begining to be questioned and with the work done by Sojourner Truth and other activists made the century a time of exploration and questioning these issues.