Summary

Analysis

Addressing her audience at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, as
“children,” Black abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth begins her speech. “When there
is so much racket,” she says, “there must be something out of kilter.”
Both the “Negroes of the South” and the women of the North are “talking about rights.”
Because of this, Truth predicts, the white men of America will soon “be in a fix.” And yet
Truth herself is still unsure about what the core of “all this here talking” is aimed toward.
Some men say that women need to be helped into carriages and over ditches—women, these
men say, should “have the best place everywhere.” But Sojourner Truth, a Black woman,
says that she never gets helped into carriages—no one gives her the “best place,” ever. “And
ain’t I a woman?” she asks her audience.

Truth states that she has given birth to thirteen children—and of those thirteen, she has
“seen most all” sold into slavery. She has cried out with a mother’s grief, and no one
but Jesus Christ has heard her. “And ain’t I a woman?” she asks.
“They talk,” Truth states, about “this thing in the head.” She asks her audience what the
thing in the head is called—and a member of the audience replies, “intellect.” Truth tells the
individual that they’re right—and that intellect has nothing to do with women’s rights or
“Negroes’ rights”. “If my cup won’t hold but a pint,” she asks, “and yours a quart, wouldn’t
you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?”

A “little man in black”—ostensibly a preacher or reverend—is always saying that women

can’t have the same rights as men because Christ was not a woman. But now, Truth asks her
audience rhetorically where Christ came from. The answer, she says, is “from God and a
woman”—man himself had nothing to do with the creation of Christ.
The first woman that God ever made—Eve—was, in Truth’s estimation, strong enough to
“turn the world upside down” all on her own. Therefore, the women fighting for equal rights
today should be able, together, to “get it right side up again.” These women are asking to
change things, and men should let them.
Referring to herself as “old Sojourner,” Truth thanks her audience for listening to her, then
states that she has “nothing more to say.”