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Assignment 01

By including details from the lives of Charlotte Woodward and Sojourner Truth, I believe Angela Davis is trying to tell us that while the Seneca Falls convention was a good starting point, it did not completely address or resolve the issues that women of all race and class were experiencing. At the Seneca Falls convention, many working class women were still working under undesirable conditions and some, like Charlotte Woodward, wanted to get out of the house and have their labor recognized. She attended the convention for reasons different from most of the attendants: to improve her working status which was an issue many of her peers did not experience. I believe Davis included Woodward and her story because while the white women there were advocating for equality, white women working with worse working conditions were not focused on and black women were not even present or supported.

She then moves on to Sojourner Truth’s story and her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?,” speech delivered at a convention for women’s rights in Akron, Ohio. Determined to free herself and her peers from sexist and racist oppression, Truth confidently rebuts opposing arguments and leads the rest of the fainthearted women at the convention to a winning argument through the use of her own experiences which showed that while she was a woman, her experiences proved she was no weaker than a man. Although people began to oppose her, she continued to lead the argument for women’s rights against the varying viewpoints in the conventions.

All in all, I believe that Davis brought up the stories of these two women to show how middle class white women were forgetting about working class white women and black women at the Seneca Falls Convention. In order to push for equality for these two ‘classes’, their life experiences had to be brought to light in front of everyone.