Ain't I a Woman?

Summary

Sojourner Truth spoke without notes at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron on 29 May 1851. The fullest report written at the time is the one printed here, by Marius Robinson, an abolitionist editor who heard the speech and published it in the Anti-Slavery Bugle of Salem, Ohio, on 21 June 1851. Robinson knew Truth well and wrote that no report could convey the effect of her words on the audience. Truth begins with her own body and labor. She has as much muscle as any man, has plowed, reaped, husked, chopped and mowed, and can carry and eat as much as a man. On intellect she uses a homely image: if a woman has a pint and a man a quart, why can she not have her little pint full? Men need not fear that women will take too much. She then turns to Scripture. She cannot read, she says, but she can hear, and she has heard that Eve caused man to sin; if a woman upset the world, she should be given the chance to set it right side up again. Answering a minister who had argued from the Bible, she recalls that Jesus never turned women away, that Mary and Martha brought Lazarus back to Him in faith, and that Jesus came into the world through God and a woman. She ends with a warning that men are caught between the slave and the woman, 'between a hawk and a buzzard'. The speech is now known by the title "Ain't I a Woman?" That refrain comes from a very different version that Frances Dana Gage, who presided at the convention, published twelve years later, in 1863. Gage's account puts Truth's words in a Southern dialect she did not speak, has her say she bore thirteen children (she had five), and describes a hostile crowd that reports from 1851 do not mention. Historians therefore treat Robinson's 1851 report as the more reliable record of what Truth said.

Top Lessons

• Argument from experience

  Truth builds her case from what she has done with her own hands. Her plowing, reaping and carrying answer the claim that women are too weak for equal rights.

• Reading Scripture closely

  Truth could not read, but she knew the Bible well from hearing it. She answers those who used Scripture against women by pointing to Eve, to Mary and Martha, and to the incarnation itself.

• Which version is reliable?

  The most famous words of this speech were probably never spoken. Comparing Robinson's 1851 report with Gage's 1863 account teaches students to ask who recorded a source, when, and why.

• For the Christian reader

  Truth, a Methodist convert who became a traveling preacher, took her name because she believed God had sent her to travel and declare the truth. Her speech rests on the conviction that God made women in His image and honored them in the gospel story, and it shows faith giving courage to a woman whom the world held in low esteem.

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