Sojourner Truth: Ain't I a Woman?

Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in Dutch-speaking upstate New York around 1797, under the name Isabella Baumfree. She was bought and sold at least four times before she turned nine. In 1826, a year before New York's gradual emancipation law fully freed her, she walked away from her enslaver with her infant daughter, later explaining: "I did not run off, for I thought that wicked, but I walked off, believing that to be all right."

In 1828 she became one of the first Black women to win a court case against a white man — a suit to recover her son Peter, who had been illegally sold into permanent slavery in Alabama in violation of New York emancipation law. She won. The case established a small but consequential precedent.

In 1843, after a religious conversion and a vision, she renamed herself Sojourner Truth and set out on what would become a forty-year speaking career. She could not read or write. Her speeches were composed orally, delivered extemporaneously, and preserved only by listeners who transcribed them afterwards — which is why the most famous of them, the speech delivered at the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, exists in multiple and contested versions.

The popular "Ain't I a Woman?" version of the Akron speech was produced by Frances Dana Gage twelve years after the fact and rendered Truth's speech in a Southern dialect she did not speak (she was a Dutch-speaking New Yorker). More accurate contemporaneous transcripts show that the speech's core argument was what made it consequential: Truth directly confronted the claim that women were too delicate for full citizenship by pointing to her own body — the body of a Black woman who had worked, birthed, lost children to slavery, and survived — as evidence that the category of "woman," as then defined, did not include her, and therefore required redefinition.

Truth lived until 1883. She continued to speak for abolition, for women's suffrage, for the rights of formerly enslaved people resettled in the West. She understood herself as bearing witness. The name she chose was, literally, her work.