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Rhetorical Analysis “and Ain’t I a Woman”

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Daizelle Huggins Engl 1301 Mr. Baggaley 9/17/11 Rhetorical Analysis “And Ain’t I a Woman” In the speech “And Ain’t I a Woman” Sojourner Truth speaks on why women should have rights at the Woman’s Rights Convention in 1851. There were women, men, Methodist, Baptist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Universalist ministers in the church who didn’t want Sojourner Truth to speak from when she walked in the door because she was a woman. The writer Frances Gage said “Again and again, timorous and trembling ones came to me and said, with earnestness,” “Don’t let her speak, Mrs. Gage, it will ruin us. Every newspaper in the land will have our cause mixed up with abolition and niggers, and we shall be utterly denounced.” (Truth 875) In those …show more content…

Another strength was that she had experience in speaking during meetings and she knew what to say and how to say it to get her audience to understand where she was coming from. She also used information from the bible to support her statements. The only weakness that she showed was the fact that she was illiterate and spoke with broken English, but that did not stop her from making her audience understand what she was saying. Sojourner Truth’s ‘Ain’t I a woman” speech had many things in common with Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. Truth gave her speech to help people better understand why women need rights that are equal to men. She listened to what everyone had to say about women’s rights then when it was her time to speak she used everyone’s arguments and flipped them so that she could make the audience think. Truth used ethos, pathos, and logos when she gave her speech so that she could reach out to each audience member. In the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” Martin Luther King wrote to the clergy men to help persuade the clergy men that African Americans deserved to be free. King also read what the clergy men had to say first then in he used their arguments and

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