arent i a woman response

Briana Weems
Aren’t I A Woman Response
6th-7th Period
Sojourner Truth’s “Aren’t I A Woman” is a speech that is powerful and uplifting. She talks about being an African woman and trying to figure out what makes her so different from any other woman on this earth. She wonders why she is not treated like all the other woman just because the color of her skin? And does the color of her skin make her anymore less of a woman? The original literature of her speech is well spoken with only a few errors. However the literature written by Frances Gage is the same words, with a different frame of speech and intelligence. Which brings a very important question in mind, did Gage just rewrite it to make her look less educated than she actually she was, or was the first piece of literature wrong?
The first essay has minor misspellings that anyone could, especially with as much education as Sojourner Truth had been exposed to. She pronounces a couple of words wrong, but over all her speech as far as sentence structures, was really accurate and impressive for a black woman at this time in history, with such little education. The literature by Gage has a few words spelled right. She uses a lot of slang and words that aren’t even used anymore. This shows that Gage is trying to show how illiterate she was and how unintelligent she was or that Sojourner really was illiterate and someone wrote the other to make her look smarter than she actually was
The first essay also had a lot of punctuation which shows that she took pauses in her sentences and sounded very educated throughout it. She took her time to get her point across and made sure that people knew where she was coming from and how she felt about the way she was treated. In the other literature there was never any type of punctuations. There were no commas, periods or exclamation points. It makes her seem like she is just talking with no purpose and just mumbling and maybe that people weren’t even taking her serious. It’s sad that someone would try to downgrade her words and make her speech less meaningful and powerful. This was a big step for a African American back then and for someone to take her shine and intelligence is really sad. She took the time to think out her speech and put her heart and all her emotions into it.
This speech also talks about segregation. How men deserve to be treated fairly and put on a pedestal. However back then they weren’t treating black like they were saying and Sojourner just wanted to know why. What made her so different that she didn’t deserve the royal treatment? What made her so different from any other white woman that she didn’t deserve the same respect that they got? She talked about all the emotions that all black women felt and the things, like disrespect, that they had to go through every day. The stress that they feel everyday and tolerate for no reason. She wanted to get a lot of people’s attention and she definitely did that. She wanted to change people’s opinions on the black woman and she definitely started that. People began to think twice of things that they did and how they treated woman and she changed them for the better of black woman all over in America just by that one speech.