The title to this work of nonfiction is from the famous words spoken by Sojourner Truth at the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, OH. Those words, "And arn't I a woman?", were a direct attack on the very ideas that men used to support their discrimination of women. She challenges the mere notion of fragility by stating that even though she bore thirteen children and cried a mother's grief when most of them were sold into slavery, that no one cared that she was woman. Why not? It mattered just as much that she was also Black.

"Black in a white society, slave in a free society, woman in a society ruled by men, female slaves had the least formal power and were perhaps the most vulnerable group of antebellum America."

White's book explores the state of the female slave in the American south. Again, slave women disproved the reasons-weakness, vulnerability, aptitude- to marginalize women as there was no chance for survival possessing any of those characteristics. This short work is broken down into six chapters that include topics like the female slave network and their life cycle. What I found to be the most prolific chapter is the first on the "Jezebel" and "Mammy" images. I came into this book already quite familiar with those stereotypes, but not well versed on their exact origins. White's research felt thorough and left me feeling more knowledgeable.

Besides those into nonfiction and scholarly works, it seems that it would also work well as a companion piece for those reading historical fiction from the same period and wanting to gain more insight into how black female slaves are depicted. Even though the focus is on southern slave women, many of the negative images and problems discussed have followed black women to all parts of the country and well into the twenty-first century.

Challenges:
POC Reading
African Diaspora