Sojourner Truth Rhetorical Analysis

Sojourner Truth’s speech at the Women’s Convention in 1851, was a very powerful, well written call to women to join together for their rights, as well as a convincing explanation of why she believes women deserve them. She gives quite clever arguments and intelligent use of rhetorical devices. In the beginning, Sojourner uses diction build a connection between her and the people listening, by using the word ‘children’. This may have been used intentionally to make them feel as they were listening to a motherly or kind, gentle, authority figure. By putting herself in a place of authority in a non- threatening manner, she made the audience more likely to trust and respect her arguments and opinion. Her first major argument is that as a woman,
She might have wanted to embarrass the man by pointing out that even a woman like her, African American slaves, could succeed without men helping her. Also, by using her personal experiences, she made the listeners feels as if their connection with her was strengthened. In her next argument, she starts to make the points less specific as she discusses intellect. She does not use the actual word, but instead uses a rhetorical question to lead the audience to believe they came to that subject more on their own merit than just something she is telling them, which makes her speech more effective in broadening the people’s views in the long run. Her third argument is probably the strongest and weakest one at the same time. Today, I believe it would be a very weak argument, but back then it was quite clever. In this point, she uses biblical references, which was very smart as, at the time, most of her audience was Christian. Christianity generally is based around a person’s personal journey with Jesus Christ, and by using this, she continued to connect with her