Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” Speech May Not Have Contained That Famous Phrase
During Sojourner Truth’s famous 1851 speech at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, she used the phrase “Ain’t I a Woman?” four times to emphasize the need to fight for equal rights for African American women.
Or says a transcript of the speech that was published 12 years later. Fellow abolitionist Frances Gage published Truth’s speech in the New York Independent in 1863, but little of it lines up with the transcript published a month after the convention by Reverend Marius Robinson in Anti-Slavery Bugle in 1851.