Ain't I a Woman?

Ain't I a Woman? is a famous speech by Sojourner Truth, who was born into slavery in New York in 1797. After she became free in 1827, she started speaking out against slavery. She gave this speech in 1851 at a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio. At the time, the speech didn’t have a title.

The speech was mentioned in a few newspapers back then, and a written version was printed in the Anti-Slavery Bugle on June 21, 1851. However, there is no word-for-word record of what Truth said.

Two years later, during the American Civil War, a woman named Frances Dana Barker Gage published a different version of Truth's speech. This one became well-known and was called "Ain’t I a Woman?" because this question was repeated throughout the speech. For a long time, this version was the one most people (including historians) knew and used. Then in 1996, when historian Nell Irvin Painter wrote a biography of Sojourner Truth and helped bring attention to the original version.

There isn’t one clear, official version of Sojourner Truth’s speech. A man named Robinson, who was a friend of Truth's and worked with her to fight against slavery and for women’s rights, wrote down what he remembered from her speech. He didn’t add his own thoughts, just what he recalled. His version was printed in a newspaper focused on ending slavery, so it was meant mostly for people who cared about the rights of Black people, mostly men. Even though Truth worked with Robinson on writing down her speech, she didn’t tell him every word to write.^[1]

There were many problems with Frances Gage's version of Truth's speech. Gage never worked with Truth when writing it down. Gage also wrote the speech using a Southern way of speaking, even though the first reports of the speech didn’t mention that. Truth was proud of how she spoke English. She was born in New York and only spoke Jersey Dutch until she was 9. Gage's version in 1863 used less of a Southern accent than her later version from 1881.

The people who heard Truth’s speech were mostly white women who were well-off. Some stories say Truth was treated with respect, but Gage said the crowd didn’t want Truth to speak. They didn’t want people to mix the fight for women’s voting rights with the fight to end slavery. These white women supported the right to vote but didn’t support Black people or the abolitionist cause. Gage’s version gives more details, but she added her own ideas and imagined the scene, including how the audience reacted. Because Gage included her own opinions and story, her version isn’t a fully accurate record of what really happened.^[2][3]

• Suffrage
• Women's rights movement
• Underground Railroad