What Is Intersectionality?

Abstract

“I am a woman’s rights,” began Sojourner Truth before a packed audience at the Ohio Woman’s Rights Convention (Painter 1996: 125–6, 281–2). Her speech that May day in 1851 recounted her lived experience as a woman. It also conveyed how Truth’s gender was inextricable from her identity as an emancipated black slave and evangelical Christian. Her words were quite personal though reflected a collective experience of suffering and resilience, which resonated among the suffragists and abolitionists of antebellum America. Enslavement, poverty, and extreme manual labor also left distinct and observable marks on Truth’s body. “I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man,” she related, “I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?” (Painter 1996:125). As her heroism became less the stuff of history and more the stuff of legend, Truth’s words morphed into the powerful and political rallying cry “ain’t I a woman.” Yet, the reference to a monolithic idea of womanhood belied the diversity of women’s realities.