Ain't I a Woman?

Overview

A three-page speech Sojourner Truth, a formerly enslaved woman and travelling preacher, gave without notes at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in May 1851. She answered ministers who claimed women were too weak for rights by pointing to her own labour in the fields and the loss of her children, and argued from scripture that Christ came from God and a woman.

The famous refrain comes from Frances Gage’s 1863 reconstruction in dialect; the 1851 report by Marius Robinson reads differently.

What happens

The occasion. On the second day of the convention, after ministers in the audience had argued that women’s weakness, Eve’s sin and Christ’s manhood all told against their rights, Truth rose from the corner where she had sat and asked to speak.

The argument from her body. In Robinson’s report she says she has as much muscle as any man and can do as much work, that she has ploughed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and asks whether any man can do more.

The argument from her children. In Gage’s version she says she has borne thirteen children and seen most of them sold into slavery, and that when she cried out with a mother’s grief none but Jesus heard her.

The argument from scripture. She answers the claim about Christ’s manhood by asking where Christ came from, and answers herself: from God and a woman, and man had nothing to do with him. As for Eve, if the first woman could turn the world upside down alone, these women together can turn it right side up.

The pint and the quart. Robinson’s report has her say that if a woman has a pint and a man a quart, why should the woman not have her pint full, and that she cannot read but can hear, and has heard the Bible.

The two texts. Robinson printed his report in the Anti-Slavery Bugle three weeks later. Twelve years on, Frances Gage published a version in Southern dialect with the refrain, and it is Gage’s that became famous.

How to read it

Read both versions side by side, as the recommended edition prints them, and notice how much of what is famous belongs to Gage rather than to the reporter who was in the room.

Pay close attention to the argument from her own body, the ploughing and the sold children, and to how it breaks an argument built on the delicacy of women by producing a woman it never imagined.

Notice the scriptural turn, Christ from God and a woman, and how it uses the ministers’ own authority in the idiom of a preacher who could not read.

Consider the dialect of Gage’s version, given to a woman raised speaking Dutch in New York, and ask what it did for the speech’s fame and what it took from its speaker.

Read this speech alongside Douglass’s What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July to compare two orators turning the audience’s own principles against it, one with a lawyer’s rhetoric and one with a preacher’s.

Questions it raises

• Which is the real speech, Robinson’s plain report or Gage’s famous reconstruction, and does the question have an answer?
• What does it do to the argument for women’s rights when the woman making it has been enslaved and worked like a man? Whose rights were the ministers and the convention actually arguing about?
• Why did Gage put the speech into a dialect Truth did not speak, and what does the refrain’s survival tell us about which voices an audience finds credible?
• How does the argument from Christ’s birth work, and why does a scriptural claim from an unlettered preacher carry more force than the ministers’ learning?
• What did it mean for Truth to belong to abolition and to women’s rights and to be fully welcome in neither, and how has the speech become the founding text for thinking about that position?
• Can a speech that exists only in others’ reports be a great book, and what does its place on reading lists say about how the canon is made?