Ain't I a Woman?

At a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, Sojourner Truth — born into slavery and freed in 1827 — answered men who claimed women were too delicate for equality by pointing to her own life of labor and loss. The refrain remembered as "Ain't I a woman?" tied the cause of women's rights to the cause of abolition.

Like Patrick Henry's, the exact wording is contested — the best-known version was published years later in a heavy dialect Truth, a native Dutch speaker, likely never used. The speech endures as a founding text of both the abolitionist and women's movements.