Question

Use details from the text to summarize Sojourner Truth’s opinion about men thinking “women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere.”

Answer 1

Sojourner Truth rejects that idea as patronizing and hypocritical. She notes that no one ever helps her into carriages, lifts her over ditches, or gives her the best place, and yet she has done the same hard work as men—plowing, planting, gathering into barns—and has borne the lash and had most of her thirteen children sold away. Using these details, she argues that women (especially Black women like herself) are not weak or in need of special protection and therefore deserve the same rights and respect as men.