Portrait of Sojourner Truth
Meet the Author

Sojourner Truth

American · c. 1797–1883 · Abolitionist and women’s rights speaker

Portrait: Sojourner Truth, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born enslaved in New York as Isabella Baumfree, she took the name Sojourner Truth in 1843 and spent the rest of her life speaking for abolition and women’s rights.

1 StoryBites Edition1 Speech or essay
Start with Ain't I a Woman? → Browse the editions

Why read Sojourner Truth?

Truth grew up enslaved in a Dutch-speaking household in New York and never learned to read or write, yet she became a speaker who could hold a hostile hall. The speech now called Ain’t I a Woman survives in two very different texts: a report Marius Robinson printed weeks after the 1851 convention, and a version Frances Dana Gage published in 1863 that added the famous refrain and put Southern dialect in her mouth. Read both, and treat the later one as evidence of how her words were remembered and reshaped.

A life in six dates

  1. c. 1797Born into slavery in Ulster County, New York, and named Isabella Baumfree
  2. 1827Freed when New York’s emancipation law takes effect on July 4
  3. 1828Goes to court in New York and recovers her son Peter, who had been sold illegally out of state
  4. 1843Takes the name Sojourner Truth and begins traveling to preach
  5. 1850Publishes the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, dictated to Olive Gilbert
  6. 1851Speaks at the women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, on May 29
  7. 1883Dies in Battle Creek, Michigan

Themes across the work

SpeechesAmerican literatureRhetoricWomen’s rightsSlavery

The StoryBites Editions

Context that actually matters

Gradual emancipation in New YorkThe state ended slavery by stages, and an 1817 law set July 4, 1827 as the day its remaining enslaved adults would be free.
Two texts of the Akron speechMarius Robinson heard the speech and printed his report in the Anti-Slavery Bugle in June 1851; Frances Dana Gage published her own version twelve years later, and the refrain readers know comes from hers.
A book she could not readTruth dictated her life to Olive Gilbert, who wrote it down, and she sold copies of the 1850 Narrative at her lectures to support herself.