It is perhaps with Sojourner Truth’s speech entitled “Ain’t I a Woman?” in mind that Angela Davis wrote “The Legacy of Slavery: Standards...

It would be difficult to believe that Angela Davis did not have Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" in mind when she wrote "The Legacy of Slavery." Both Truth and Davis demonstrate through the example of black female slaves that women are equal to men. Both essays expose the false ideology that holds that women cannot have equal rights to men because women are more frail and delicate than males. If the rationale for denying women equal rights is that they are weaker than men, both women illustrate that line of reasoning to be absurd.

Sojourner Truth's account differs from Davis's in several ways. First, it is a first person narrative. Truth offers an eloquent testimony of her own direct experience as a slave. Davis, born much later, never experienced slavery firsthand. She relies on her research in order to provide secondary sources and describe first person accounts of slavery. Davis also brings her knowledge of the Vietnam war and Marx into her analysis. Second, Truth did not read from a written text, and accounts of her speech are mediated through the lenses of white people who heard, wrote down, and published her words. Davis, in contrast, is writing her own text in her own words.

Both women emphasize the black woman's ability to work as hard as men. Truth says the following:

Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman?

Davis uses strikingly similar examples of black slave women's strength and ability. She quotes one contemporary observer of Mississippi slave women:

Forty of the largest and strongest women I ever saw together; they were all in a simple uniform dress of a bluish check stuff; their legs and feet were bare; they carried themselves loftily, each having a hoe over the shoulder, and walking with a free, powerful swing like chasseurs on the march.

Both Truth and Davis emphasize the power and stamina of the black woman. Davis points out that despite mythologies that place female slaves in the "big house" of the master as cooks or mammies, most black women worked in the fields and were expected to work as hard as men, even if they were pregnant or nursing children. She describes how pregnant and nursing black women were beaten if they complained or could not keep up with the expected pace of work.  

Davis's anaylsis is more extensive than Truth's first person narrative and argues that because whites asserted total control over slaves, they could not allow the slaves to have any hierarchy in their own homes. If black men got the idea they were "masters" of their homes, this would encourage other dangerous ideas. This, Davis contends, led to equality in black families.

Davis also explores the role of rape as an added form of terror to which black women were subjected. Davis likens this form of terror to the rape Vietnamese women experienced at the hands of American soldiers. Davis also shows rape as a means for white owners to impregnate slaves and profit from the sale of the slave women's children. Truth, in contrast, does not directly speak of rape, though she possibly hints at it by mentioning the many children she bore. 

Both Truth and Davis make a compelling case for the black female slave as proving female equality. The accomplishments of black women in slavery, even if the product of misery, horror, and brutality, show beyond any doubt that women are equal to men and that ideologies of women as inherently weaker are myths.