BLOG 5: Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth’s “And Ain’t I a Woman” is a speech about women’s rights. She uses simple arguments to justify that she deserves equal treatment. She says that someone said women “need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the place everywhere”, but nobody does that for her (Truth). Then she argues that she can do just as much work as men can do, and after that she makes it a religious argument. She says that men had nothing to do with Jesus because it was just God and a woman (Truth). She makes fairly obvious arguments that are generally common sense, but they are firm and persuasive. If there was a central philosophy to her message it would be that people need to essentially use sense and logic to govern their discriminatory views, specifically toward women. Obviously the main point to her speech was that she, along with all women but explicitly black women, deserves to be treated respectably as a woman, but epitomizing her philosophy explains this.

This can sort of be related to Emerson in “Self Reliance”. He said to "trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string” (Brugman). This could be interpreted to represent common sense, which would relate to Sojourner Truth. Fundamentally everyone should have common sense, which would be the hearts vibrating to the same iron string. Emerson also says “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius” (Emerson). In this he says that everyone knows what is true, and Truth basically says that everyone knows, or should know, that her people are not being treated justly when they should be.

It is a slightly harder to relate Thoreau to Sojourner Truth. One quote that does it is when Thoreau said “A man has not everything to do, but something… because he cannot do everything…” (Thoreau). In this sense, Sojourner Truth was just doing that “something”, which would be helping women. A kind of correlation between the two is that Thoreau comes out against the state and sort of wants people to have more control and power in their lives, while Truth basically has to fight to have any power over her life.

Brugman, Patricia. "Work in Emerson's 'Self-Reliance'." McClinton-Temple, Jennifer ed. Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2011. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=&iPin=ETL0379&SingleRecord=True (accessed January 31, 2012)

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Self-Reliance." Ralph Waldo Emerson Texts. Web. 13 Feb. 2012. .

Thoreau, Henry David. "Thoreau's Civil Disobedience - with Annotated Text." The Thoreau Reader. Web. 25 Jan. 2012.

Truth, Sojourner. “And Ain’t a Woman.” Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 370. Print.