This section employs the same calling out of hypocrisy that Douglass uses in his speech on the fifth of July (regarding the Declaration of Independence and how the country’s ideals didn’t adhere to it, or at least extend its principles to women). And it is done with the rhetorical strategy of anaphora by starting multiple sentences with “he,” referring to what men have taken away from women in terms of freedom. This strategy would have been powerful when read out loud at the convention, evoking emotion in the audience and also driving the point home that there were many rights that men had that were not offered to women.

At the end of the first paragraph, Grimké quotes a man (Professor Follen) who agrees that women have the same capacity for rational thoughts and morals as men but enjoy few of their same rights. This usage of a man’s word to boost her own credibility seems to be similar to how Harriet Jacobs employed a white woman’s name as an editor in her book, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” to boost her credibility as well.

Jacobs, along with millions of other enslaved women not only had to deal with the trauma of being sexually assaulted regularly, but also the isolation that came with it. She mentions in this that she didn't want her grandmother to find out about the assaults, and while I can't know if this was because she thought her grandmother would be ashamed or blame her, but it seems clear that Jacobs herself felt heavy with shame for being consistently violated. So there seems to be no one to confide in here (seeing as her mother passed away). This whole passage is a glaring reminder that many, many women experienced sexual assault while enslaved, and it was an isolating experience because of the shame that befell them and the need to keep quiet about it.

While the appeal to patriotism is very much present throughout Douglass' speech (seeing as it was given on July fourth), this part stood out to me--here Douglass reminds his audience that the idea of independence from the British Empire was "alarming and revolutionary" at the time. It may have appeared as though it was always meant to be, but it had to be taken away from the British (this seems obvious, but is sometimes lost in all the pageantry of our country, take for example, how Benjamin Franklin wanted the fancy statue of himself, as if he had fulfilled a destiny like a god rather than participated in a reckless revolution). Oftentimes, people who err on the conservative side and fear progression use the argument that the agendas being pushed are happening at too fast a pace; that people must be more patient even when pushing for something like basic human rights. I remember reading a letter that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote to a reverend from jail arguing against the fairytale of gradual and passive, nondisruptive change for the purpose of white comfort. But back to this passage--the way I interpreted this was that he was making a connection between the right to declare independence from the British and the right to be treated equally as a Black man in America, which would hopefully sway people who argue that change has to be "gradual" and not "extreme" in order for it to be morally right.