Frederick Douglass
This is the occasion that prompted Douglass to give his speech in 1852
What is the Fourth of July / Independence Day
Stanton's address was directed at this governing body, asking it to extend rights to women
What is the New York State Legislature?
Sojourner Truth delivered her famous speech at this type of convention in Akron, Ohio.
What is a Women's Rights Convention?
Walker's Appeal was addressed primarily to this audience.
What is Black Americans / enslaved and free people of African descent?
All four authors share a common target: the gap between this country's founding ideals and its treatment of marginalized people.
What is the United States of America?
Douglass argues that the ideals of the Founding Fathers — liberty, justice, and equality — are this in relation to enslaved people
What is a sham, mockery, or hollow/empty promise?
Stanton argues that women are subject to laws without having this — a principle she links directly to the American Revolution.
What is representation (no taxation without representation)?
Truth challenges male arguments against women's rights by repeatedly pointing to her own physical labor and strength, asking this rhetorical question.v
What is 'Ain't I a Woman?'
Walker makes this provocative claim about the condition of Black Americans compared to enslaved people in ancient history.
What is that Black Americans are the most degraded, wretched, and abject people that have ever existed (worse than any other enslaved group in history)?
Three of the four authors — Douglass, Stanton, and Walker — all invoke this founding American document to expose hypocrisy.
What is the Declaration of Independence?
Rather than celebrating, Douglass says the Fourth of July reveals this about America to the enslaved person
What is the gross injustice and cruelty/hypocrisy of America's treatment of enslaved people?
Stanton points out the legal absurdity that this type of man — convicted of crimes — has more political rights than any woman
What is a convicted criminal / felon / male prisoner?
Truth's speech is groundbreaking because it exposes a tension within the women's rights movement itself — specifically this blind spot.
What is the exclusion of Black women from the concept of 'womanhood' / the movement's failure to address race?
Walker directly challenges Thomas Jefferson's claims in this document, arguing they are hypocritical and self-contradictory.
What is Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson's argument about Black inferiority)?
Wollstonecraft, Stanton, and Truth all challenge this liberal assumption — that full rational and political personhood applies universally.
What is the liberal assumption that the 'universal' subject of rights is male (and white) — i.e. liberalism's exclusionary definition of who counts as a rational person?
Douglass uses this rhetorical shift — moving from 'your' Fourth of July to 'my' — to mark this distinction
What is the exclusion of Black Americans from the promises of American freedom and independence?
Stanton draws on this Enlightenment framework, also used by Locke and Jefferson, to argue that women's rights are natural and inalienable.
What is natural rights / social contract theory?
Truth refutes the religious argument that women are too weak or intellectually inferior by invoking this biblical figure and argument.
What is Eve / the argument that if a woman (Eve) could turn the world upside down by herself, women together can set it right?
Unlike Douglass and Stanton, Walker's tone is notably this — he does not appeal to white goodwill but instead issues this kind of call.
What is a militant / urgent call to action, including the possibility of violent resistance to slavery?
Walker and Douglass both use this rhetorical strategy: turning the language and values of white America back on itself to expose its contradictions.
What is immanent critique / using America's own stated values (liberty, equality, Christianity) to condemn its practice of slavery?
Despite his scathing critique, Douglass ends the speech with cautious optimism, citing this as evidence that slavery's days are numbered.
What is the spread of abolitionist sentiment, international opinion, and the growing contradiction between slavery and American democratic ideals?
Stanton's address implicitly critiques Liberalism's core contradiction — explain what that contradiction is as it applies to women in 1854.
What is the contradiction between liberalism's universal claims about reason and rights, and its practical exclusion of women from citizenship and legal personhood?
Scholars now use this term — coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw — to describe the intersecting experience of race and gender that Truth's speech prefigures nearly 140 years earlier.
What is intersectionality?
Walker grounds his argument for Black liberation not in Enlightenment liberalism but in this framework, making his text distinct from the others in the unit.
What is Christianity / religious and moral framework — he argues God will judge slaveholders and that Black people have a divine right and duty to resist oppression?
Looking across the full unit — from Smith and Locke to Walker and Truth — identify the core tension that unites all the texts we've read.
What is the tension between liberalism's universal claims about freedom, reason, and rights, and the systematic exclusion of women, Black people, and the poor from those very freedoms?