Throughout earlier, more narrow-minded periods of American history, courageous and discontented minorities have spoken out about their lack of civil rights. Even with the oppression she was born into, escaped slave and prominent abolitionist Sojourner Truth spoke out against her situation, and hoped to enlighten the antithetic audience about the reality of being anything but a white American male in a racist society. In the eye-opening speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” by Sojourner Truth, given at the Akron Women’s Convention, she highlights the oppression she has faced from American society to her antithetic audience by effectively utilizing the rhetorical devices of repetition, juxtaposition, parallelism, and imagery. By effectively instilling repetition and juxtaposition, the tragic reality of a minority’s life is unveiled. Truth delineates the disparity between women of different race as she explains, “… women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches… Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles…” Truth juxtaposes that while she is a woman, as a former slave, her treatment is unfathomable compared to that of a white woman who is treated like a princess by the men who have oppressed blacks like her. Because she is …show more content…
Truth explains, “Ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I am women? I could work as much…” This parallelism of the “ain’t I a woman” cultivates a tone of helplessness and confusion she faced as a slave who did not understand where this hatred arose. With every sentence between the repeated phrase, the audience is exposed to her hardships doing men’s work that she would not have to do, had she been white. They encourage women to be “damsels in distress,” but if she had been, she would have died. The audience can fathom the pain she endures with this