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The speaker of “Still I Rise” doesn’t describe a particular physical setting, but throughout the poem she does reference several aspects of her social environment: America in the late twentieth century. This social environment is, from her perspective, deeply oppressive and discriminatory. The speaker addresses her society directly in the poem, and through her general tone of defiant confrontation, we readers can deduce some key characteristics of that society. For instance, the speaker’s society expects her, as a Black woman, to act demure, ashamed, and melancholy. But as she indicates in the fourth stanza (lines 13–16), she refuses to bend to such demeaning expectations:

     Did you want to see me broken?
     Bowed head and lowered eyes?
     Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
     Weakened by my soulful cries?

The expectation that women should lack self-confidence is characteristic of a patriarchal society. The expectation that Black women specifically should act broken and demure is further characteristic of a racist society. The speaker of “Still I Rise” speaks to America’s history of slavery and white supremacy, but she refuses to be defined by that history: “Out of the huts of history’s shame / I rise / Up from a past that’s rooted in pain / I rise” (lines 29–32). Read through the lens of the speaker’s defiance, then, a clear setting for the poem emerges: the racist and patriarchal society of the late twentieth-century United States.

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