On May 29, 1851, a woman asked to address the attendees of the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron. She cut a striking figure, close to six feet tall even without her crisp bonnet. She was more than likely the only Black person in the room.
A procession of participants had already sounded off about the plight and potential of the “fairer sex” during the two-day gathering. “We are told that woman has never excelled in philosophy or any of the branches of mathematics,” said abolitionist Emily Rakestraw Robinson before noting that women were largely barred from higher education. Lura Maria Giddings lamented: “The degraded, vicious man, who scarcely knows his right hand from his left, is permitted to vote, while females of the most elevated intelligence are entirely excluded.” A dispatch about women’s labor from Paulina W. Davis, who would later create the women’s rights periodical The Una, painted a verbal picture of “mother and sister toiling like Southern slaves, early and late, for a son who sleeps on the downiest couch, wears the finest linen and spends his hundreds of dollars in a wild college life.”
Yet the only speaker from that day who attained near-mythical status was Sojourner Truth, a formerly enslaved traveling preacher from New York State. What exactly she said remains an unknowable mystery; the accounts vary significantly. But all versions of her remarks make one thing clear: Sojourner Truth challenged the idea of women’s inferiority. By her words and nonpareil presence, she pushed attendees to see her womanhood and her humanity, categories typically denied to antebellum Black people, slave or free.
The most circulated version of her speech—published by the conference chair Frances Gage 12 years later—quoted Truth as repeating the question “Ar’n’t I a woman?” while allegedly baring her arm in a show of muscle. Since that day, Sojourner Truth has been known almost entirely for the refrain of that speech. Few people realize that she went on to meet President Lincoln, hobnob with Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe and advocate for government land grants for freedpeople after the Civil War. Her longevity as an evangelist and activist—with four decades of work for Christianity, abolition, suffrage and Black freedom movements—transcends the soundbite from the Akron convention.
Today, scholars, community organizers and Truth’s own descendants are working to bring a more complex version of her to an American public used to simplistic versions of the past.