Addressing the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio,
in May of 1851. Truth addressed the white women present who wanted rights for women,
saying that if the black women joined forces with them the "white men will be in a fix"
soon. In a rhetorical question, she challenges the differences that the men contend
make them superior to women. For instance, Truth asserts that she can work as hard as
any man, she can eat as much as any man, and she can go over ditches and climb as well
as any man. As proof of the prowess of women, Sojourner Truth alludes to the fact that
Jesus Christ was born of a woman who conceived through the Immaculate Conception,
through the power of God, without any contribution from
man:
Where
did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with
Him.
In the final paragraph
of her address, as edited in 1851 by Frances Gage, a feminist activist, which added the
rhetorical question "Ain't I woman" along with more Southern slave dialect, Truth
employs a metaphor that compares the world to an orb that a woman is able to
move:
If the
first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone,
these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up
again!
The "world" is a
metaphor for the existential condition on earth, one in which women are treated as
inferior. Sojourner Truth suggests that in unison all women should be able to correct
this unjust treatment of women.
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