Book cover: Supplied. Image composite: Maverick Life 
A Brief History Lesson
The risk we take here is in the act of speaking out, with all its implications. Itʼs precisely because we have been spoken of, infantilized (infants: those who donʼt have speech of their own, who speak of themselves in the third person, because they are spoken of by adults), that in this work we take on our own voice. Which is to say, the trash will speak, and we donʼt care what you think.
– Lélia Gonzalez, “Racism and Sexism in Brazilian Culture”
I am part of a long tradition. For centuries, Black women have fought for recognition as political subjects, while also generating arguments against prevailing hierarchies. Barred from and ignored by the brokers of institutional and political power, we have been forced to devise creative strategies to raise our voices.
I want to begin by tracing the intellectual roadmaps and battle strategies of Black women, beginning with an example of how a Black woman I admire spoke into the concentrated centres of power nearly two centuries ago.
Born into captivity in Swartekill, New York, Isabella Baumfree assumed the name Sojourner Truth in 1843 and became an abolitionist, orator, and womenʼs rights activist. At the 1851 Ohio Womanʼs Rights Convention in Akron, she delivered her famous speech, widely known as “Ainʼt I a Woman?” A printed version of this improvised speech was popularised some twelve years later by Frances Gage, a feminist and co-author of a huge compendium of materials on first-wave feminism, History of Woman Suffrage. The first recorded version of the speech, however, was published by Marcus Robinson in the June 21, 1851, edition of The Anti-Slavery Bugle, and it probably did not contain the famous titular words. Instead of a question—Ainʼt I a woman?—we have a declaration: I, a Black woman, am a womanʼs rights.
May I say a few words?... I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a womanʼs rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal; I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now. The Lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept – and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who bore him. Man, where is your part? But the women are coming up, blessed be God, and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.
As early as the nineteenth century, Sojourner Truthʼs speech exposed a major dilemma that mainstream feminism would have to confront: the universalised category of “woman.” When Sojourner Truth says, “I am a womanʼs rights,” she is asserting that Black women occupy a vital place in the womenʼs rights movement.
Today, thanks to third-wave feminism, we are able to move beyond the structural universal when talking about women and take into account factors such as race, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
But Sojourner Truthʼs speech, along with Black womenʼs forgotten histories of resistance, intellectual legacies since before slavocracy, and political and social activism, testifies to the reality that this battle was already well under way long ago. The problem was its invisibility to the eyes of the powerful – particularly those within the feminist movement.
As we can see from Sojourner Truth, regardless of whether you consider her a feminist in the usual sense of that term, awareness of intersecting identities within feminism was present from the first wave of feminism – and before. Furthermore, the works of thinkers such as bell hooks and Audre Lorde, among others, show that it persisted through the second wave.
Though Truth probably never uttered the question, Ainʼt I a woman? became a rallying cry for generations of Black feminists, including hooks, whose 1981 book by this title is a foundational work, one of the first to highlight the intersecting identities present within feminism. Yet throughout both the first and the second wave of feminism, discussions of intersectionality were largely relegated to the sidelines, considered marginal to more central topics such as voting rights and womenʼs status in the workplace.
Giovana Xavier, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and an organiser of the study group and directory Visible Black Intellectuals, seeks to centre Black feminist advocacy, restoring it to its rightful place as an integral part of feminist history. In her article “Feminism: Copyright of a Beautiful Black Practice,” she asserts:
In this dialogue, which is also about protagonism, listening ability, and speaking place, we ask these questions: Which stories are untold? Who, in Brazil and in the world, are the trailblazers initiating social projects and conducting experiments in the name of equality and liberty? Whose voice was suppressed for a single story of feminism to become the truth?... As guardians of this ancestral heritage, it is on us to bring visibility to these histories of glory and creativity we carry. This turning point in our narratives connects to the primary agenda of Black feminism: the act of restoring denied humanities.
Nearly two hundred years ago, Sojourner Truth challenged the dominant conceptualisation of feminism, asserted herself as a protagonist, and in so doing sought to restore such denied humanities. In another speech, called “On Womanʼs Dress,” she declares,
When I saw them women on the stage at the Womanʼs Suffrage Convention the other day, I thought, What kind of reformers be you, with goose wings on your heads, as if you were going to fly, and dressed in such ridiculous fashion, talking about reform and womenʼs rights? ʼPears to me you had better reform yourselves first. But Sojourner is an old body, and will soon get out of this world into another, and wants to say when she gets there, Lord, I have done my duty, I have told the whole truth and kept nothing back.
In mocking the goose-feather hat, Sojourner Truth emphasises that she is speaking about the women of privilege who were on the front lines of the womenʼs suffrage movement. When she says, “you had better reform yourselves first,” she indicts their failure to recognise the experiences of Black women and to see the perpetuation of racism as relevant to the feminist agenda.
What mattered to white women was gaining rights for themselves, a priority that has endured even as Black women write and speak about their ongoing lack of recognition as a political category. Sojourner Truthʼs words remind us that voices forgotten by mainstream feminism have been speaking for a long time.
The question that follows is this: Why has it taken so long for them to be heard? DM
Where We Stand by Djamila Ribeiro is published by Yale University Press.