Sojourner Truth's 'Ain T I A Woman?'
In her “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech, Sojourner Truth uses definitions of women and descriptions of their strength in order to create an argument advocating for their equality. Instead of using explicit definitions, Truth presents implied definitions of what makes a woman. First, she explains the societal definition of a woman as someone who “needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere,” implying that women are the weaker, and therefore inferior, sex. Truth then asserts that she does not fit into this societal definition but is still a woman in every respect. She exposes this definition of women as faulty; she, a person who has suffered greatly at the hands of society and has never experienced
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Both speakers use appeals to higher standards in order to give weight to their arguments; in Truth’s speech, she invokes the name of God and intertwines religion into her speech in order to strengthen her argument, while Anthony refers to the Supreme Law of the Land, the United States Constitution, to give legal and nationalistic credence to her argument. While Sojourner uses her biblical references to enhance the descriptive aspect of her argument, in Anthony’s speech, the Constitution becomes the basis for some of the definitions that she uses to argue for universal equality. Anthony argues on technicality and principle; she uses the dictionary definition of a citizen in conjunction with clauses of the nation’s founding document in order to reach the conclusion that women, as well as men, have unalienable rights, privileges, and immunities. In contrast, Truth uses more implicative definitions and ample description to convey a similar point: that all women are equal, and that all women are theoretically equal to men, and that women have the power to make that into a reality. While Anthony’s speech relied heavily on definition and Truth’s on description, both women effectively argued for the inherent right of both women and African Americans to
Both speakers use appeals to higher standards in order to give weight to their arguments; in Truth’s speech, she invokes the name of God and intertwines religion into her speech in order to strengthen her argument, while Anthony refers to the Supreme Law of the Land, the United States Constitution, to give legal and nationalistic credence to her argument. While Sojourner uses her biblical references to enhance the descriptive aspect of her argument, in Anthony’s speech, the Constitution becomes the basis for some of the definitions that she uses to argue for universal equality. Anthony argues on technicality and principle; she uses the dictionary definition of a citizen in conjunction with clauses of the nation’s founding document in order to reach the conclusion that women, as well as men, have unalienable rights, privileges, and immunities. In contrast, Truth uses more implicative definitions and ample description to convey a similar point: that all women are equal, and that all women are theoretically equal to men, and that women have the power to make that into a reality. While Anthony’s speech relied heavily on definition and Truth’s on description, both women effectively argued for the inherent right of both women and African Americans to