Isabella Baumfree, who would later take the name Sojourner Truth, was born into slavery in rural New York State 1797, the second youngest of 12 or 13 children. Although her first master was relatively kind, her family lived in the often flooded, muddy cellar of her master's home. Sojourner Truth was deeply impacted by her servitude. Slavery in the north was not milder than in the south, just "different." Land-holdings were smaller there so each northern family unit needed fewer slaves than those in the south. Consequently, slave families were more often split up with the buying and selling of slaves, causing slaves to loose their family, friends, and owners at the same time. As was her parents' case, slaves were often emancipated late in life when they could do little useful work and had become a drain on the slaveholder. Eventually, like her father, the freed slaves became "dependent on goodwill in inclement weather and the sun's warmth in fair seasons."

      In 1817, NY passed a law emancipating slaves - in 10 years time. After being promised her freedom in return for her hard work, Isabella took her youngest child and walked away to freedom in 1826 when her master refused to honor his promise. With her son, she moved to New York City about 1828.

      After becoming disenchanted with the vice and corruption of the city, Truth became determined to leave the city. Having memorized the Bible in her youth and grown in spirituality over the years, she developed an ever maturing "ecumenical philosophy" that was a blend of Catholic, Quaker, and Presbyterian Christianity and ancient African nature worship. She became an itinerant worker, working, learning from the local ministers, then moving on to the next town. At one of the camp-meeting which she attended, fearing for her life, she calmed a riotous mob with her singing. Emboldened, by 1843 she had become a wandering preacher, traveling through the northeast giving her first hand accounts of slavery, preaching the evils of slavery, and advocating the rights of women.

      In 1850, while headquartered in Salem, Ohio, she dictated her autobiography The Narrative of Sojourner Truth to Olive Gilbert. Gilbert partially censored the work: some of the sexual events which were typical episodes in the slave woman's life were too delicate for the expected readership. On the move again, Truth resettled permanently in Battle Creek, Michigan in 1857.

      During the Civil War, she met with Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln and she recruited Michigan "colored troops" for the Union. Well into her 60s, she became an early freedom rider in the post-Civil War years: she desegregated Washington DC streetcars by suing the company for not allowing her to ride on one.

      Since Truth could not write, only her words which were written down by others have come down to us. One of her most reported speeches was the speech she gave at the Akron, Ohio Woman's Rights Convention of 1851. Just as nearly two hundred years earlier Margaret Askew Fell Fox used God's curse of the serpent to justify, almost to demand, that woman take to the pulpit, Truth uses Eve's responsibility for bringing sin into the world to demand that contemporary women become active in the social and political. To her, women are obliged to right the wrongs inflicted on the world by Eve's sin. Truth's allusion to the creation story might be brief, but it contains a powerful idea.

      Since Truth was illiterate and spoke extemporaneously, several versions of her "Ain't I a Woman?" speech exist. Several newspapers reported on the speech when it was given. These reports were reconstructed from the reporters notes: all of the accounts vary. As an example of the difficulty of reconstructing the spoken word, I have tried to reconstruct the pedigree of the most commonly quoted version and a version that some regard as more indicative of the true speech. I reproduce both versions below.

      Some historians believe that the version reported by the Salem, Ohio, June 21, 1851, Anti-Slavery Bugle is a more accurate, but less dramatic, rendition of Truth's "Ain't I a Woman Speech?" I have taken it from Carleton Mabee and Susan Mabee Newhouse's Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend (1995). The speech, without the newspaper's discussion of the conference, can also be found in Margaret Washington's edition of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth [New York, Vintage Books, 1993]. Notice that the phrase "Ain't I a Woman" never appears in this version of the speech.

      "One of the most unique and interesting speeches of the Convention was made by Sojourner Truth, an emancipated slave. It is impossible to transfer it to paper, or convey any adequate idea of the effect it produced upon the audience. Those only can appreciate it who saw her powerful form, her whole-souled, earnest gesture, and listened to her strong and thrustful tones. She came forward to the platform and addressing the President with great simplicity:

      May I say a few words? Receiving an affirmative answer, she proceeded; I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman's rights [sic.] 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? I have heard much about the sexes being equal; I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now.

      As for intellect, all I can say is, if woman have a pint and man a quart - why can't she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much - for we won't take more than our pint'll hold.

      The poor men seem to be all in confusion and don't know what to do. Why children, if you have woman's rights give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won't be much trouble.

      I can't read, but I can hear. I have heard the Bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept - and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who bore him. Man, where is your part?

      But the women are coming up blessed be God and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard." pages 81-82

      The most commonly referenced version of the speech was written down by Frances Gage, president of the Akron, Ohio Woman's Rights Convention of 1850 where the speech was presented. Written down using southern dialect 12 years after the convention, this version of the speech first appeared in the May 2, 1863 issue of the National Slavery Standard. It was later incorporated into Truth's 1875 revised autobiography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, and volume 1 of the History of Woman Suffrage (1881) by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Susan B. Anthony. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell in Man Cannot Speak for Her, Vol 2: Key Texts of the Early Feminists [New York, Praeger, 1989] reproduces Frances Gage's version of the speech - after rendering it into fairly standard English. The version that Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza quotes is a poeticized version of Frances Gage's report.

      Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza in Jesus; Miriam's Child, Sophia's Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology, Continuum, 1995, quotes Sojourner's speech:

"That man over there say
 a woman needs to be helped into carriages 
and lifted over ditches 
and to have the best places everywhere. 
Nobody ever helped me into carriages 
or over mud puddles 
or gives me best place . .  
And ain't I a woman? 
Look at me! 
Look at my arm! 
I have plowed and planted 
and gathered into barns 
and no man could head me . . . 
And ain't I a woman? 
I could work as much 
and eat as much as a man - 
when I could get it - 
and bear the lash as well, 
and ain't I a woman? 
I have borne 13 children 
and seen most all sold into slavery 
and when I cried out a mother's grief 
none but Jesus heard me . . . 
and ain't I a woman? 
That little man in black there say 
a woman can't have as much rights as a man 
cause Christ wasn't a woman. 
Where did your Christ women from? 
From God and a woman! 
Man had nothing to do with him! 
If the first woman God ever made 
was strong enough to turn the world 
upside down, all alone, 
together women ought to be able to turn it 
rightside up again."

References:

      Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, Vol 2: Key Texts of the Early Feminists [New York, Praeger, 1989]

      Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza in Jesus; Miriam's Child, Sophia's Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology, Continuum, 1995

      Carleton Mabee and Susan Mabee Newhouse, Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend (1995)

      Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Susan B. Anthony, History of Woman Suffrage (volume 1, 1881)

      Sojourner Truth, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 1875

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