Mid-19th Century speech pro-tip: when in doubt, reference the Bible.

Yeah, we know. Barring a mishap with a time machine, it's unlikely that you'll find yourself giving speeches in the 1850s anytime soon. But Sojourner Truth was, and she knocked it out of the park by referencing a couple of stories that pretty much everyone knew: the garden of Eden, and the life of Mary.

The religious allusions are fairly straightforward, keeping to Truth's style of reasoning. She hammers home the point that God certainly depended on Mary to bring Jesus around—it's hard to get a baby into the world without a uterus, after all. This pretty much debunks the idea that:

[…] women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! (19)

Yeah. That logic is pretty skewed.

Truth also references Eve as a woman who was "strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone." (26)

This is a bold, bold choice. Truth could have picked from any number of strong female Biblical figures—Ruth, Sarah, Miriam—but she alludes to the woman that got humanity kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

But Truth isn't looking to pick a Biblical figure who necessarily did the most good; she's looking for the woman that just did the most. And Eve is credited with changing the world in a fundamental way, what with snacking on the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and forcing humans to leave paradise for a far more real-world experience—one complete with death, labor, and shame.

Yeah. Truth's point: if one woman can do all that with one bite of a crisp Red Delicious, just imagine what thousands of women can do to the 19th Century status quo.