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Sojourner Truth — Remarks at the Women's Rights Convention, Akron, Ohio (the 1851 Robinson report)

About this text — the two versions

There is no single “Ain’t I a Woman?” text. What stands above is the contemporaneous record: Marius R. Robinson’s report in the Anti-Slavery Bugle of June 21, 1851, printed within a month of the convention by a man who was in the room. It has no “Ain’t I a Woman” refrain and no rendered dialect. The famous refrain version comes from Frances Dana Gage, published twelve years later (1863), which recast Truth’s words in a Southern plantation dialect that Truth — a New Yorker whose first language was Dutch — never spoke. CultureTechLens publishes the 1851 report as the record; the Gage text, if ever shown here, will be labeled an 1863 reconstruction, not a transcript. The Bugle scan’s letterpress is rough in places; the wording above is the report’s, assembled from its legible passages.

The speech

Internet Archive / Project Gutenberg machine text, lightly cleaned (line-break hyphenation rejoined, spacing and page furniture removed, a small number of obvious OCR letter-garbles corrected to the printed reading). Wording, spelling, and punctuation of the source editions are otherwise retained.

[Marius R. Robinson's report:] She came forward to the platform and addressing the President said 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. 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 a woman have a pint and a 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 can'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 so 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 the 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.