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  • Ar'n't I a Woman?In the Vanguard of the History of Race and Sex in the United States
  • Stephanie M. H. Camp (bio)

I would like to begin by thanking Deborah Gray White for writing Ar'n't I a Woman? and by expressing how important that book was in my intellectual formation. I read the book in the late 1980s in a class on the history of black women in the United States taught by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, then at the University of Pennsylvania. I was a college junior, and I thought I was on my way to cooking school after graduation. But that seminar, and Ar'n't I a Woman? in particular, changed the direction of my life. In that class I learned that black women had a history and that it was recoverable. I learned that even the seeming impossible—the excavation of enslaved women's stories—could be done, if only one dug enough in the archives. I was captivated. And so, swept up in the passions of women's history in the 1980s, I said goodbye to cooking school and hello to graduate school. The model of Ar'n't I a Woman? has stood me in good stead all these years, through graduate school and through the writing of my own book on enslaved women. I swear it has whispered to me from my bookshelves and encouraged me when the obvious difficulties of researching and writing about enslaved women proved frustrating or even daunting. And I know I am not alone; I am part of a generation of women, women of color in particular, who have found inspiration in Ar'n't I a Woman?

One of the major impacts of Ar'n't I a Woman? was the way in which it tackled the entangled nature of race and gender in U.S. history. This idea is a commonplace one now (although we still have a great deal to learn about how exactly that entanglement played out on the ground), but it was hardly so in 1985, when Ar'n't I a Woman? was originally published. Rather, it was an idea that White, along with other feminists of color, especially black feminists, were just beginning to unravel.

For White wrote at a time when women's history and the history of race were not really a very compatible pair. As African American scholars became prominent participants in second-wave feminism, they criticized some of the assumptions made by other scholars and activists. They pointed out that "woman" was a category that was shaped by other social categories, notably race and class, and that the "normative" middle-class white female did not, in fact, speak for all women. In the 1970s and 1980s, women of color repeatedly reminded white feminists and men of color that women of color existed, and that their distinctive issues were also feminist in nature. Their insistence on their own existence attested to the fact that [End Page 146] non-white women were authentically women (not just inadequate versions of white women) and that they were no less racial subjects than their male counterparts, even if they insisted on paying attention to the multiple kinds of oppressions that they experienced.1 The black feminist critique ultimately undermined the widespread assumption that "all the women are white and all the blacks are men."

Among women of color waging the struggle for their womanhood, no symbol was so powerful as the image of the ex-slave, feminist, and abolitionist Sojourner Truth. Truth's powerful rhetorical question—wasn't she a woman even with her muscles and her supposed lack of delicacy?—was a crucial instrument in highlighting the convergence of social categories that women of color have embodied in the history of the New World. For women of color and especially for black women, Truth's insistence on her womanhood despite and because of her muscles and history of work was ahead of its time. Truth spoke to the frustrations of those who, when they attempted to engage with white feminism, found there a stubborn insistence that only the forms of oppression faced by white middle-class women...

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