"May I say a few words?"
Sojourner Truth begins her speech with a polite request for a moment to speak. In context, her words are a poignant reminder of the few opportunities for advocacy and elocution afforded to women, African-Americans, and most especially black women at the time. Although the tone of this question is respectful, Sojourner Truth's words challenge the oppressive structures in America at the time that denied women like her a public voice. These words are powerful evidence that Sojourner Truth intended to make her voice heard.
“I am a woman’s rights.”
Sojourner Truth commences with an effective rhetorical device, personifying herself as the embodiment of women's rights. Her assertion is a powerful introduction to the speech, reminding the audience that she can embody and lay claim to the principles of feminism just as much as any white woman.
“I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed.”
During her hard life, she has demonstrated one of the rights of women—to do every backbreaking chore ever asked of a man. Implicitly, this litany of physical tasks poses the following question: if she can do the same work as a man, why doesn’t she enjoy all the benefits of such equality?
“If woman has a pint and man a quart—why can’t she have her little pint full?”
In this quote, Sojourner Truth employs irony to address the view, typical at the time, that women are simply less intelligent than men. This view was used to justify the denial of rights to women. But here Truth postulates that condescending point of view and, taking it for granted, proceeds to reason that women should still be afforded opportunities to exercise the full range of even a lesser intelligence.
“But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk and buzzard.”
Truth ends her speech with an ironic twist on a colloquialism. Rather than asking her audience for sympathy for women or for slaves or both, she turns the tables, implying that men are the ones who deserve our pity. This approach inverts the power dynamic and concludes her speech on a compelling and captivating note.
