Ain't I a Woman
The speech known as Ain't I a Woman is the address Sojourner Truth gave at the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, on 29 May 1851, and it survives in two printed versions that differ so much that no single wording can honestly be called the text.
One was published three weeks after the event by a man who was in the room. The other appeared twelve years later, in a southern dialect, and it is the version that supplies the famous refrain and the title everyone now uses. Anyone who quotes this speech is quoting one of those two documents, and almost everyone is quoting the later one without knowing it.
The two printed texts of the Akron speech
The two printed texts are separated by twelve years and by an editor. The table below sets out what each one is, because the difference between them is the single most important fact about this speech.
| Question | The 1851 report | The 1863 version |
|---|---|---|
| Who produced it | Marius Robinson, who was present at Akron | Frances Dana Barker Gage |
| Where it appeared | The Anti-Slavery Bugle | Published separately in 1863 |
| When | 21 June 1851, about three weeks after the speech | 1863, twelve years after the speech |
| Dialect | Not written in southern dialect | Written throughout in southern dialect |
| The familiar refrain | Does not contain it in the form everybody knows | Is the source of it |
| Status | Contemporaneous report | Later recollection and rewriting |
Neither version is reproduced here, and the reason is practical. A record that already contains one text too many is not improved by a third arrangement of the words, which is what every retelling produces. What a reader needs is the shape of the problem, and the shape is this: the version in the schoolbooks is the one published in 1863, and the version written down at the time by somebody who heard it says something recognizably related but not the same.
Which report is contemporaneous, and why that settles the ranking
The contemporaneous report is Robinson's. He was at the convention, and his account ran in the Anti-Slavery Bugle on 21 June 1851, roughly three weeks after Truth spoke on 29 May. That is as close to the event as anything in this case gets, and by the ordinary standards applied to any other speech it would be the reference text without argument.
The 1863 version has none of those advantages. Twelve years is long enough for a speech to be remembered as it ought to have been rather than as it was, and long enough for an editor to shape it for a reading audience that had, by then, been through a decade of abolitionist publishing and was still fighting a civil war. That does not make the 1863 version worthless. It makes it a document about 1863. Historians use it, and should, as evidence of how Sojourner Truth was being presented at that moment. It is a poor guide to what was said in an Ohio meeting hall in 1851, and it is the version almost every quotation on the internet is copied from.
Why a southern dialect is very unlikely in Sojourner Truth's mouth
A southern dialect is very unlikely because Sojourner Truth was not southern. She was born enslaved in Ulster County, in the state of New York, around 1797, under the name Isabella Baumfree, and she was raised there. Her first language was Dutch. New York's emancipation law freed her in 1827, and she went to court in that state to recover her son Peter, and won the case. Nothing in that life produces the speech patterns of the Deep South, and a good deal in it argues against them.
The 1863 version nonetheless renders her in that dialect from beginning to end. The effect of the choice is not neutral. It changes a woman who spoke English as a second language, learned in Dutch-speaking New York, into a figure the reader recognizes from a different set of books entirely. When a modern performer or a modern textbook reproduces that spelling, it is reproducing an 1863 editorial decision about how a formerly enslaved woman ought to sound, not a record of how this one did.
Why Sojourner Truth was at Akron in 1851
Sojourner Truth was at Akron because she was, by 1851, a traveling speaker on abolition and on women's rights, and the Woman's Rights Convention in Ohio was one of the annual meetings that followed the first National Woman's Rights Convention at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850. She spoke on 29 May. Her standing in the room was not that of a delegate reading a paper: she had been enslaved in the United States and had used an American court to get her child back, and she said so from the platform.
That is also the answer to why the speech is important, and the importance does not depend on the wording. They asked for it in writing in 1848, and it took the form of a founding document. The Declaration of Sentiments sets out a schedule of grievances that assumes a woman with property to lose, wages to be taken and a husband to take them. The case built on that footing at convention after convention was argued as though the woman in question were white, free and married. Truth stood up in front of it as a woman to whom none of that applied and required the room to include her in the word woman. Both printed versions agree on that much, and it is the part that has never been in dispute.
What to do if you are quoting the Akron speech
Quote the 1851 report, name it, and date it. The practical rule for a student, a teacher or a writer is short:
- Cite Marius Robinson in the Anti-Slavery Bugle of 21 June 1851 when you want what was said.
- Cite the 1863 version by its publisher and its date when you want the famous refrain, and say that it is a later version.
- Avoid presenting the dialect spelling as a transcript of Sojourner Truth's speech.
- Avoid the phrase historians disagree, which conceals what they disagree about.
The title of this page is itself the 1863 version's phrase, because that is the name the speech now has and there is no point pretending otherwise. What was actually said at Akron on 29 May 1851 is a narrower question, and the honest answer is that we have one report written near the event and one rewriting published twelve years later, and that they are not the same speech.