History of the United States I / Unit 13 USH1 1860 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
What Truth Challenged
The idea
Truth questioned the priority given to men within abolitionism and the priority given to White women within the women's rights movement. Some advocated a sequence in which White women would gain the vote first and Black women later, and Truth opposed that framework directly. Her speech at the Akron women's rights convention in eighteen fifty-one is the best-known statement of the position, arguing that she had as much muscle as any man and could do as much work, that she had ploughed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and asking why, if woman had a pint and man a quart, she could not have her little pint full.
In practice
A formerly enslaved woman telling a women's convention that its account of womanhood did not describe her.
Where people slip
Truth's argument exposes what entry 1853's comparison conceals. The claim that women were like enslaved people was made by women who were not enslaved, and it treated womanhood as a single condition. Truth had done field labour that the ideology of female delicacy said women could not do, which refutes the premise by testimony rather than by argument. The two movements shared people and methods, and they did not share a single account of who needed what.
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