Finding Sojourner’s Truth: Race, Gender, and the Institution of Property

This Article begins with the signature speech of Sojourner Truth, one of a handful of Black women of the nineteenth century who became an important figure in the abolitionist movement, a national figure in her own time, and an icon of both historical and contemporary feminism. As the emblematic Black woman of her time and as a Black woman that both suffered under and transcended slavery, Sojourner Truth was and is a critically situated subject through which to examine the crosscutting constructions of race and gender forged under slavery.