On May 29, 1851, Sojourner Truth attended a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio. She approached the speaker’s platform and asked “May I say a few words?” The speech she gave that day was transcribed by Marius Robinson, a reporter in the audience. A month later, Robinson worked with Sojourner Truth to publish her words in the Anti-Slavery Bugle. Yet twelve years later, Frances Dana Gage republished those words under the title, "Ain't I a Woman?" in The New York Independent. In Gage's version, many of Sojourner Truth's words are changed, and she falsely attributed a southern slave dialect to Truth's words.
Sojourner Truth never published her words under her own name, so there is no conclusive way to tell which version, if any, is correct. But scholars maintain that Truth never spoke the words, "Ain't I a Woman?" by which the speech is now most commonly known, and that Gage invented those words for her own publication. As a result, this ClassicNote focuses primarily on the version published by Robinson in 1851 as its subject of analysis.
