Ain’t I a Woman? Summary

In her brief but powerful speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” delivered at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention of 1851, Black abolitionist and feminist activist Sojourner Truth urgently describes the need for equal rights for women in the United States. Truth’s speech was one of the first to highlight the need for intersectional rights for Black men and women. Throughout “Ain’t I a Woman?” Truth uses raw, urgent language to describe the pain and suffering she endured as a formerly enslaved woman in order to point out the grave injustices being perpetrated against Black men and women all over the country.

Truth’s speech was revolutionary for its time: it spoke unapologetically about the horrors of slavery, the corruption of the Christian religious establishment in the U.S., and the hypocrisy of those who would confer the rights to suffrage and property ownership unto white women, but not Black women. While only a few paragraphs long, Truth’s speech managed to pointedly address many of the most urgent issues in American society at the time.