Shop
 Explore 

Sojourner Truth's real 'Ain't I a Woman?' speech was nothing like the famous one we all read

A prime example of how historical distortions can paint a totally inaccurate picture.

sojourner truth

Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons

The famous Sojourner Truth speech most of us learned is a fabrication.

For generations, students have read the extemporaneous speech Sojourner Truth gave at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851, known widely as "Ain't I a Woman?" As a formerly enslaved Black woman speaking out against slavery and for women's rights, Truth made some powerful points in her speech—except the speech most of us read is almost nothing like the one she delivered.

The way "Ain't I a Woman?" is written makes it sound as if Truth walked straight off a Southern plantation. But Truth was a Northerner her entire life. The Southern dialect that permeates the popular version of her speech is a total fabrication.

It wasn't Truth who altered her speech, though. A white abolitionist woman named Frances Dana Gage published the speech 12 years after it was given, and her version is the one that became popularized, in all its glorious inaccuracy.

Let's start at the beginning.

Sojourner Truth was born as Isabella Baumfree to parents who were enslaved by Dutch settlers in Ulster County, New York, in 1797. When she was 9, she was sold away to another New York enslaver, and by the time she was 14, she'd been sold to several different slave owners around New York State. After being raped by her final enslaver, harassed by his wife, and heartbroken over the man she loved being beaten to death by his owner on a neighboring farm, she escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826—the year before New York's gradual phasing out of slavery was set to be complete.

Truth chose her famous name in her forties, after a religious awakening in which she felt called to travel and speak out against slavery. She became a powerhouse in the early abolitionist movement. In addition to her fierce civil rights advocacy, she successfully sued one of her former owners for custody of her youngest son, who had been sold illegally, making her the first Black woman to take a white man to court and win.

During her adult life, Truth lived in New York and Massachusetts and eventually settled in Michigan. She traveled extensively, but since her entire childhood was spent in New York—and since her first language was Dutch—she wouldn't have had a Southern accent or spoken in a Southern dialect at all.

Since she couldn't read or write, the speech Truth gave in 1851 was never written down by her, so history relies on the people who were present to know what she said. The first attempt to publish a full account of her speech came a few weeks after she delivered it, when journalist Marius Robinson published his version in The Anti-Slavery Bugle on June 21, 1851. According to The Sojourner Truth Project, Robinson was good friends with Sojourner Truth, and there is documentation that she went over his transcription before it was published.

That version, titled "On Woman’s Rights,” begins:

"May I say a few words? I want to say a few words about this matter.

I am a woman’s rights.

I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?"

It's a strikingly different account than the one published in 1863 by Francis Gage, which reads in part:

"Dat man ober dar say dat women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have de best place eberywhar.

Nobody eber helps me into carriages or ober mud-puddles, or gives me any best place.

And ar’n’t I a woman?"

Gage's version has been altered over time to smooth out the spellings, and "ar'n't" morphed into "ain't," but the distinct Southern accent remains in the speech we famously attribute to Truth today. (For instance, check out the speech shared by The Hermitage museum, which is the version most of us have read, here. The two originally published versions can be compared side by side here.)

According to The Sojourner Truth Project, "Frances Gage admitted that her amended version had 'given but a faint sketch' of Sojourner's original speech but she felt justified and believed her version stronger and more palatable to the American public than Sojourner's original version."

But changing her speech matters for a couple of reasons. For one, making Truth appear to be Southern adds to the oversimplification of slavery as only a Southern problem, when in reality slavery existed in the Northern states as well. They just abolished slavery earlier than the South, and without fighting a heinous, bloody war over it first.

Secondly, Truth herself did not care for people changing the way she talked, as The Sojourner Truth Project shares:

"In an 1851 issue of the Kalamazoo Daily Telegraph, an article states that Truth prided herself on 'fairly correct English, which is in all senses a foreign tongue to her…People who report her often exaggerate her expressions, putting in to her mouth the most marked southern dialect, which Sojourner feels is rather taking an unfair advantage of her.'"

It also matters because the truth matters. As the United States grapples with its history of racism and slavery and Americans argue over the lenses and narratives through which we tell our national story, it's vital that we strive to be truthful. Learning about history requires that we constantly stay open to not only learning things we may not have learned, but also relearning things we may have learned wrong.

Check out The Sojourner Truth Project for more details about Truth and to see a more accurate representation of what she actually said in her famous speech. And listen this reading of Robinson's version of her speech, read by a woman with a contemporary Dutch accent in an attempt to get closer to Truth's original speech:

From Your Site Articles

1 in 8 kids in the U.S. experiences food insecurity. One simple grocery choice can help.

It's truly a win-win.

Albertsons

No child should have to worry about getting enough food to thrive.

True

When you’re a kid, summer means enjoying the fun of the season—plentiful sunshine, free time with friends, splashing in pools and sprinklers. But not every child’s summer is as carefree as it should be.

For some, summer means going hungry. According to Feeding America, food insecurity affects 1 in 8 children in the U.S., largely because families lose the free or reduced-price meals at school that help keep them fed during the school year.

But back-to-school time doesn’t make food insecurity disappear, either. Hunger is a year-round issue, and with the increased cost of groceries, it’s gotten harder for families who were already struggling to put food on the table.

So what can be done—or more specifically, what can the average person do—to help?

The good news is that one simple choice at the grocery store can help ease the burden a bit for those experiencing food insecurity. And the even better news is that it’s also a healthy choice for ourselves, our families and our planet. When we’re out on our regular shopping trips, we can simply look for the O Organics versions of things we would already buy.

But wait—aren’t we all feeling the pinch at the checkout stand? And isn’t organic food expensive? Here’s the thing: Organic food is often much more affordable than you might think. The cost difference between organic and non-organic products keeps narrowing, and many organic and non-organic foods are now almost identical in price. Sometimes you’ll even find that an organic product is actually cheaper than its brand-name non-organic counterpart.

Since 2005, O Organics has helped give health-conscious shoppers more options by making organic food more accessible and affordable. And now, it’s helping those same shoppers take action to fight food insecurity. For every O Organics product you purchase, the company will donate a meal to someone in need through the Albertsons Companies Foundation—for up to a total of 28 million meals.

Look for the O Organics label in every aisle.O Organics

Here’s what that means in real-world terms:

Say you’re throwing an end-of-summer backyard BBQ bash. If you were to buy O Organics ground beef, hamburger buns, ketchup and sea salt potato chips, you’d be donating four meals just by buying those four ingredients. If you added O Organics butter lettuce and O Organics sandwich slice pickles, you’d be donating two more meals, and so on.

And where are those meals going? Albertsons Companies Foundation works with a network of national and local charities fighting hunger, and regional divisions choose organizations to fund locally. So every O Organics product you purchase means a meal on the table for someone in your area who might not otherwise have the nourishment they need.

No kid should have to worry about getting enough food to thrive. We all make conscious choices each time we walk down a grocery store aisle, and by choosing

O Organics, we can make a difference in a child’s life while also making healthy choices for ourselves and our families. It’s truly a win-win.

From Your Site Articles

food insecurity

Woman who lives on a cruise ship for free shares the 4 things she can’t do

Living on a ship isn’t perfect. It’s just close to perfect.

via Pixabay/Pexels

A beautiful ocean liner

Upworthy has covered a few stories about people who decided to live permanently on cruise ships because it's cheaper than living on land or in a nursing home. These stories have connected with millions because they say a lot about the modern cost of living but are also aspirational.

Christine Kesteloo has become popular on TikTok with over 680,000 followers because she shares what living on a cruise ship is really like. Kesteloo is the wife of the ship’s Staff Chief Engineer, so she gets to live on the boat for free. She only has to pay for alcohol and soda, which she gets for half off.

“I live on a cruise ship for half the year with my husband, and it's often as glamorous as it sounds,” she told Insider. “After all, I don't cook, clean, make my bed, do laundry or pay for food.“

Keep ReadingShow less

'If we dismissed everyone the way we dismiss moms' video hits home, but not just for moms

Phew, this is eye-opening.

My Kinda Mum/Facebook

Mom acts out scenes that flip the script on dismissing moms who vent.

Sometimes it feels like moms can't win. We're supposed to give our all for our kids, sacrifice ourselves for motherhood, fulfill the various responsibilities of child-rearing, and do it all under two unwritten but well-understood rules: 1) Never mess it up, and 2) Never complain.

It's the second rule that feels particularly cruel since the first rule simply isn't possible anyway. (Moms mess up motherhood all the time, even if we don't admit it.) But when we vent about the hard parts, the response is often dismissal, as if we don't have the right to complain or as if doing so means we're not grateful to have our kids.

A viral video from My Kinda Mum illustrates the absurdity of the way people respond to mom complaints with a little script-flipping roleplay.

Keep ReadingShow less

People applauded after Mark Wahlberg confronted the DJ at his daughter's dance party

Dad to the rescue.

via TheEllenShow / YouTube

Mark Wahlberg on "The Ellen Show."

Actor Mark Wahlberg recently attended a daddy-daughter dance with his 10-year-old, Grace. Sadly, Grace had no interest in seeing her father strutting his stuff on the dance floor.

"I didn't get one dance," Wahlberg told Ellen DeGeneres. "And I told her we were going to do the whole big circle and I was going to go off. And she said, 'Dad, if you embarrass me, I will never talk to you again.' But what she did do is she hung out with me."

No matter who your dad is, especially if you're a 10-year-old-girl, you have zero desire to see him dance in front of your friends.

But the parents at the dance probably would have had a blast seeing Wahlberg bust out some of his old-school '90s Marky Mark moves.

However, Wahlberg couldn't help but leave his mark on the music being played at the dance.

Keep ReadingShow less

mark wahlberg scolds dj

New mom vents frustration over American maternity leave in comparison to the rest of the world

"The people who decided that it is okay to leave an infant at a daycare at 6 weeks old? Jail."

Anna Gantt|TikTok

New mom vents over American maternity leave.

Have you ever tried giving birth? It's not for the weak. In fact, the entire process leading up to birthing an entire human out of your body isn't for the weak. Being pregnant changes and stretches parts of your body you didn't know existed. Even the volume of blood that pumps through your heart increases.

Your joints loosen, your hips spread and for some reason, your nose and lips can spread, too. And even though your nose looks big enough to stick your fist into, you can't breathe through it efficiently. Pregnancy is a lot. But birth, whether vaginally or via cesarean is like running a marathon with little to no training. Then come the hormones, sleep deprivation and healing.

But if you're working in America when you happen to go through that life-changing experience, you can hang up any thoughts of having adequate time to heal and bond with your baby. In many instances, you've got six weeks—and those weeks may or may not be paid. (The U.S. is one of the only countries that doesn't federally guarantee paid maternity leave, and most states don't mandate paid maternity leave, either.)

Keep ReadingShow less

maternity leave

Woman hosts 'living funeral' for her dying sister and calls the experience 'magical'

“I would describe it as an exclamation point at the end of a sentence. The sentence of her life."

Canva

Living funerals can provide closure and comfort.

What do you do when you or a loved one becomes terminally ill? When the inescapable end all but sends a morbid telegram announcing its arrival? Do you "go gentle into that good night," filling the final days with solemn reverence and aching nostalgia? Or do you go out with a bang, choosing instead to savor whatever else life still has to offer?

For Heidi Satterthwaite, the choice was obvious.

Her sister, Jenna Satterthwaite, shared on BBC’s “Woman’s Hour” that Heidi had been diagnosed with a rare type of cancer known as myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), which occurs when blood-forming cells found in bone marrow are abnormal, back in 2018.

Before her death, Heidi made a heartfelt request to her sister—that they throw a party with all of their family and friends.

Keep ReadingShow less

Here are 5 things a child therapist says he doesn't do while playing with his kids

Parents often do one of these things to try to make play educational, and it may surprise you.

Good Morning America|YouTube

Five things a child therapist doesn't do while playing with his kids

Being a parent is both oddly unique and similar for all who embark on that life journey. You're in a state of constant worry that you're messing up in one way or another, while simultaneously knowing that you're doing your best to raise good humans. Not everyone can be an expert in child development, and that doesn't mean they're doing anything wrong.

But when you've got the inside scoop from someone who does have a deep understanding of child development, you pay attention. A child therapist has shared a list of things that he never does while playing with his children. Even if you have this insider knowledge, a refresher like this one can be helpful.

Joshua Terhune is a child therapist and father of two who keeps his list of "don'ts" in mind when engaging in child-led play with his children. Here are five things he says he avoids while playing:

Keep ReadingShow less