Sojourner Truth Refuses to Be Left Out

At a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, Sojourner Truth stood up to speak. She brought experiences that comfortable definitions of womanhood often excluded: enslavement, labor and the struggle to obtain freedom. Her intervention challenged an argument as much as an audience. If women were described as delicate people who needed protection, what place did that leave for women whose lives had never been protected?

Truth had been born into slavery in New York under the name Isabella Baumfree. Her early language was Dutch, not the Southern dialect later associated with her in a famous version of the speech. After escaping slavery, she pursued the return of a son who had been sold away. In 1843, she adopted the name Sojourner Truth and made religious speaking and antislavery activism central to her public life.