Ain't I A Woman? (front Cover).gif - Different Versions

Different Versions

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. The first complete transcription 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. Robinson's full account of the speech included not one instance of the question "Ain't I a Woman," let alone four repetitions of it. Instead, the only questions that Robinson recorded was Truth asking were: "...can any man do more than that?" and "Man, where was your part?"

Twelve years later in May 1863, Frances Dana Barker Gage published a very different version. In it, she gave Truth many of the speech characteristics of Southern slaves, and she inserted new material that Robinson didn't report. 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 the oft-repeated refrain added by Gage. Truth's own speech pattern was not Southern in nature, as she was born and raised in New York, and spoke only Dutch until she was nine years old.

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 to 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 boast more children. Further inaccuracies in Gage's 1863 recollection of the convention 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. 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. 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.