Life's Pleasures Quote by Sojourner Truth

The power here is its plain arithmetic. Truth doesn’t argue for women’s rights or Black freedom by flattering the listener’s ideals; she tallies the facts of labor and appetite, then lets the moral conclusion corner you. “We do as much” is a blunt inventory of work: enslaved and formerly enslaved women hauling, harvesting, cooking, raising children, surviving violence, holding up an economy that refused to recognize them as fully human. In a culture that loved to romanticize “womanhood” as delicate and protected, Truth answers with an unromantic ledger.

“We eat as much” is the sly turn. Appetite is bodily equality, undeniable and faintly taboo in polite rhetoric. She drags the debate out of abstract “rights” and into the everyday reality of hunger and provision: if society counts on women’s bodies to produce and sustain life, why pretend those bodies are too fragile for citizenship?

Then the kicker: “we want as much.” Want is desire, ambition, freedom, property, dignity. It quietly exposes the condescension underneath so-called benevolent sexism and racist paternalism: the idea that some people don’t really “want” autonomy, or wouldn’t know what to do with it. Truth refuses that infantilization. She claims full interiority - not just the capacity to suffer or serve, but to aspire.

The line’s strategy is radical restraint. No ornament, no pleading, no moral theater. By repeating “as much,” Truth levels the hierarchy with a simple rhythmic insistence: if the inputs are the same - work, hunger, desire - the outputs should be, too. It’s an argument that sounds like common sense because it is, and that’s what makes it dangerous to the status quo.