The speech begins with Sojourner Truth politely asking permission to say a few words. She opens with the conclusion, “I am a woman’s rights,” and begins laying out her evidence. She asserts that she is as strong as any man and is capable of doing the work of a man such as plowing and reaping crops in the field. She then subtly addresses the specific issue of gender equality by answering any lingering doubt that she can cut and carry as much as a man. Regarding the issue of intellectual inequality, she makes a sudden and effective shift in rhetoric by asserting that if a man has a quart and a woman only has a pint, she should be allowed to keep that full pint.
She then admits she cannot read, but she can certainly hear, and many of the things she has heard are stories from the Bible. In particular, she references the story that Eve is the cause of all the sin of mankind. Rather than trying to argue against that point, she suggests that if one woman can cause all that trouble for the world, she should be given the chance to put things right. Next, she moves to Jesus and the New Testament, reminding her audience that the Lord seemed willing to give women a second chance. When Mary and Martha came to Jesus in grief over their death of their brother, for example, Jesus did not spurn them, but rather raised Lazarus from the grave. And finally, Truth asserts that it was a woman that brought Jesus into this world through the intervention of God. Man himself, she says, is missing from the story.
The speech ends with yet another rhetorical shift from allusion to metaphor. After asking where man’s part is in this plan of God, she admits that man is, indeed, in a difficult position. With the slave already on him, and the woman fast approaching, Truth ends on a note of sympathy for the white man, who is perhaps caught “between a hawk and a buzzard.”
