Summary:*
Sojourner Truth begins her speech at an 1851 women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio, with a simple intervention: "May I say a few words?" After asking permission, she begins with a topic sentence that introduces the subject of her speech: "I am a woman's rights."
Truth then launches into the meat of her speech. She begins with comparisons to men, stating that she is as strong as any man, can perform as much physical labor as any man. In fact, she has; Truth lists the types of physical labor that she has performed in her years as a slave, and then asks, "Can any man do more than that?" Indeed, she says, she can confirm all the talk that has been circulating in recent times about equality between the sexes. After all, she reiterates, she can carry and eat as much as any man.
Then Truth turns her attention the subject of women's intelligence. She takes for granted the condescending view that women have a lesser quantity of intellect than men, but inquires as to why men are invested in preventing women from reaching the full potential of even that limited intellect. After all, she addresses men, "You need not be afraid" that giving women rights will deplete their strength, since women will only be able to acquire as much power as they are capable of. Men, she says, are confused. They don't know what to do, even though it is obvious that they should give women their rights, and they will "feel better" if they do.
Next, Truth introduces religious imagery to strengthen her case. Although she cannot read herself, she admits, she has heard the biblical story of Adam and Eve. If Eve caused Adam to sin, she asks, why can Eve not be given a second chance? Truth then gives an example from the New Testament. In the story of Lazarus, two women—Mary and Martha—came to Jesus with "faith and love" and convinced him to raise their brother, Lazarus. Finally, Truth discusses the birth of Jesus, posing the question of his origins to her audience. God created Jesus and woman bore him, she reminds them, and men played no role in it at all.
Sojourner Truth ends her speech with a gesture of sympathy towards men. It must be difficult for them, she muses, with women asking for their rights at the same time as slaves struggle for freedom. They are caught, she finishes, "between a hawk and a buzzard."
*Summary and analysis of the version of Sojourner Truth's speech as replicated by Marius Robinson in 1861 in the Anti-Slavery Bugle.
Analysis:
Sojourner Truth's words make a nuanced and compelling case for equality between the sexes and the races. She does so first through a powerful rhetorical strategy: addressing her audience directly. She asks several rhetorical questions, without intent of receiving an answer, but instead to sharpen her argument for the audience. At the same time, her questions seemed directed not at the likely sympathetic audience in front of her, but to an imaginary audience filled with her adversaries: white men who disapprove of the notion of equality. She asks, "Can any man do more . . . " than she can? Later, she poses another question to those men: " . . . Why can't [woman] have her little pint full?" And finally, in regards to the birth of Jesus, her most damning example, she asks the imaginary audience of men, "Where is your part?" These questions are intended to provoke her audience to consider the answers and thus show the faults of her adversaries' arguments. Although scholars argue over whether the conference at Akron, Ohio, did have dissenters in the audience, Truth's direct questioning of the audience is a powerful moral provocation, regardless of the level of hostility actually present in the audience.
Another of Truth's masterful rhetorical strategies in this speech is the tone she employs to cast herself as a wise, old figure. Towards the middle of the speech, Truth transitions towards a more reflective tone—away from her strident characterizations of her man's strength. She addresses the audience as "children," for example, immediately casting herself as a figure above the fray. Almost affectionately, she tells the audience that they "will feel better" if they give women their rights, as if she were instructing a child to go to bed. Their own rights, she adds, "won't be so much trouble." In this way, Truth pivots from her earlier argument that women can be just as traditionally masculine as men, and towards an embrace of the typically feminine position of mother and caretaker.
Truth adds to this caretaking tone with gestures of sympathy, thus inverting the hierarchy of pity that otherwise might place her, a black woman and former slave, at the very bottom. No, Truth asserts, white men are in fact the ones to pity. The "poor men," she notes in a bemused tone, "seem to be all in confusion," as if to imply that men are the ones that need guidance and instruction, not women. This rhetorical strategy is an example of Truth's fierce wit. Indeed, she ends the essay not with any resolute conclusion of her argument but rather with a moment of sympathy for those same men who oppose her. They must be "in a tight place," she concedes, between being asked to give rights to women and to slaves, all at the same time.
In her speech, Truth also takes care to address counterarguments in order to bolster her own position. She begins with the argument that men are stronger than women, and thus should be a in a higher position in society. Her choice of weapon against this line of reasoning is her own lived experience. As a slave, she reminds the audience, she has "plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed" as much as the men. She has "as much muscle" and can "do as much work" and, point blank, is "as strong as any man that is now." By beginning her speech with an example that she can prove through her lived experience as a slave, Truth introduces what today would be called an intersectional approach, one of the central thrusts of her advocacy: that black women are women too, and that neither group should be forgotten in the struggle for the liberation of the other.
The second counterargument that Truth implicitly addresses is that women are less intelligent than men and therefore undeserving of equal political and social rights. To address this argument, Truth takes a different tack. Rather than combating it with lived experience, she concedes its central premise: women only have a "pint" size amount of intelligence, she points out, whereas men have a full "quart." Truth's masterful and subtle rhetoric is on full display here, as she asks the audience why a woman should not be allowed to take full advantage of her intellect, even if it is lesser than a man's. Perhaps Truth understood that this was a more difficult premise to dismantle than her earlier point about equal strength. Maybe she expected prejudice from the audience would prevent them from accepting her equal mind, even if they may accept her equal muscle. Whatever the reason, Truth's nimble dance between direct argumentation and Devil's advocacy cements her status as a skilled and effective rhetorician.
The final counterargument that Truth addresses is a biblical one. As an avid Christian, Truth deftly uses religious commentary to bolster her position. For example, she addresses the view that Eve caused Adam to sin in the Garden of Eden by tasting the forbidden fruit, and thus women are forever lesser and more prone to fault. In response to that argument, Truth issues a simple but compelling maxim: " . . . if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again." In this way, Truth implicitly appeals to forgiveness, a different value espoused by her Christian faith.
