Two Postscripts on a Column

New York Times

14-04-2025

'Ain't I a woman?' Well, no, I'm not.
Yet ever since I first read that refrain in Sojourner Truth's famous speech to the 1851 Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, I've thought of it as belonging to the canon of great American rhetoric — right up there with Abraham Lincoln's 'With malice toward none' and Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I have a dream.'
It's for that reason that I cited the line in my April 8 column as an example of the kind of American spirit I treasure — what I called 'the shared conviction that strong and weak are united in a common democratic creed.'
The problem — as I learned after the column was published — is that Truth may never have said it.
We may never know for sure. A near-contemporaneous transcript of the speech, published in June 1851 in the Anti-Slavery Bugle newspaper, does not contain the famous phrase. But it did appear (as 'And ar'n't I a woman?') 12 years later, in a very different version of the speech published by the feminist abolitionist Frances Dana Barker Gage, who had presided over the convention.
Among the reasons not to believe Gage's account: Her version of Truth's speech is rendered in a Southern dialect. But Truth was born in upstate New York as a slave to a Dutch-speaking family, and spoke English with a Dutch accent.
Whatever the case, both versions of the speech are powerful and ring true, morally speaking, and Truth's place in the pantheon of American heroes remains secure.
There are also less-heralded heroes in the American story, including two who came to my attention this week almost by accident.
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