The first reports of the speech were published by the New York Tribune on June 6, 1851, and by The Liberator five days later. Both of these accounts were brief, lacking a full transcription.[5] The first complete transcription, titled "On Woman's Rights",[6] was published on June 21 in the Anti-Slavery Bugle by Marius Robinson, an abolitionist and newspaper editor who acted as the convention's recording secretary.[7] Robinson was in the audience during Truth's original speech.[8] The question "Ain't I a Woman?" does not appear in his account.[9]
Twelve years later, in May 1863, Frances Dana Barker Gage published a very different transcription. In it, she gave Truth many of the speech characteristics of Southern slaves, and she included new material that Robinson had not reported. Gage's version of the speech was republished in 1875, 1881, and 1889, and became the historic standard. This version is known as "Ain't I a Woman?" after its oft-repeated refrain.[10] Truth's style of speech was not like that of Southern slaves;[11] she was born and raised in New York, and spoke only Dutch until she was nine years old.[12][13][14]
Additions that Gage made to Truth's speech include the ideas that she could bear the lash as well as a man, that no one ever offered her the traditional gentlemanly deference due a woman, and that most of her 13 children were sold away from her into slavery. Truth is widely believed to have had five children, with one sold away, and was never known to claim more children.[9] Further inaccuracies in Gage's 1863 account conflict with her own contemporary report: Gage wrote in 1851 that Akron in general and the press in particular were largely friendly to the woman's rights convention, but in 1863 she wrote that the convention leaders were fearful of the "mobbish" opponents.[9] Other eyewitness reports of Truth's speech told a different story, one where all faces were "beaming with joyous gladness" at the session where Truth spoke; that not "one discordant note" interrupted the harmony of the proceedings.[9] In contrast to Gage's later version, Truth was warmly received by the convention-goers, the majority of whom were long-standing abolitionists, friendly to progressive ideas of race and civil rights.[9]
In 1972, Miriam Schneir published a version of Truth's speech in her anthology Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings.[15] This is a reprint of Gage's version without the heavy dialect or her interjected comments.[15][8] In her introduction to the work, she includes that the speech has survived because it was written by Gage.[15]
The version known as "Ain't I a Woman" remained the most widely circulated version until the work of historian Nell Irvin Painter, followed up by the Sojourner Truth Project, found strong historical evidence that the Gage speech was likely very inaccurate, and the Robinson speech was the likely the most accurate version.[16][8][17]
