Feminist and Women Studies

Feminist and Women Studies

  • Type of paperCritical Thinking
  • SubjectAmerican History
  • Number of pages1
  • Format of citationMLA
  • Number of cited resources1
  • Type of serviceWriting from scratch

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/truth/1850/1850.html

Answer

Feminist and Women Studies

            Women’s studies entail an interdisciplinary academic field that offers various topics with regards to women, gender, and feminism. The studies look at women’s status in society and pursue to progress and advance the condition of women lives. This paper gives a summary of a free and classless spirit in the face of institutional discrimination on women, focusing on the narrative, Sojourner Truth.

Feminism is the belief that all women, regardless of their race and ability, should have social, political and economic equality to men. Existing in American popular culture, Sojourner Truth (birth name was Isabella Baumfree) stands a solid and working arm with a voice that contributes to the movements for equality and women’s right. Through her voice and arm, Truth managed to use her body to advocate for social norms and to construct new approaches to existing in the 19th-century society (Brah, Avtar & Ann, 2004).

While current literary studies tend to demonstrate that there exists a limit of assuming a relation between the narrative and the author, this summary suggests that Truth’s self-representation sought attention to her black and female body. In 1844, Truth joined Northampton Association of Education and Industry – a self-sufficient group in Massachusetts, focused on recognizing women’s capabilities and a mandate for their equal standing in American society (Gilbert, 1853, p. 115).

She strongly fought for black and women rights, reproving the abolitionist community when it failed to advocate for black women equal to black men. She believed that women’s suffrage to be significant in the fight for equality, and would love to see black men on the equal measure as white men, just to abandon women without even voting rights.

Although the summary focuses on a historical context, it exemplifies the need for the continued quest for the intersection of race and gender where various feminist opinions for women’s equality continues to depend on the rhetoric of ability.

 

References

Brah, Avtar, and Ann Phoenix. “Ain’t IA woman? Revisiting intersectionality.” Journal of             International Women’s Studies 5.3 (2004): 75-86.

Gilbert, Olive. Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A northern slave, emancipated from bodily servitude           by the state of New York, in 1828. Author, 1853.