Want Equal Rights? The Truth Is - Just Take Them!
Sunday, March 7, 2010 at 02:19PM "If women want any rights more than they's got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it." —Sojourner Truth, former slave, abolitionist, Methodist minister, and early U.S. women’s rights leader
International Women’s Day began 99 years ago. With so much progress accomplished since 1911, yet so 
much more remaining to be done, it seems to me that it’s time for women to change our approach to something closer Sojourner Truth’s.
Her advice to women as she stated it in the above quote to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the influential anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, when they met in 1853, comes from a position of knowing her own power. Despite being been born into slavery and experiencing oppression, poverty, and discrimination far greater than most women reading this blog in 2010, Truth was way ahead of many of us in her perspective about how to advance equal rights.
Without question, in many places around the globe, women remain as oppressed as Sojourner Truth--born Isabella Baumfree in Ulster County, New York, and once sold for $100 and a herd of sheep--was before she “walked off” from her master.
But even in the most gender-repressive societies such as Yemen, there are Sojourner Truth-like women and girls such as ten-year-old Nujood Ali,