Did Sojourner Truth say Ain't I a Woman?

Probably not in those words. The famous version of the speech was published twelve years after she gave it, by someone who was not a neutral recorder, and it differs substantially from the account published at the time.

Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in New York around 1797, escaped with her infant daughter in 1826, and became a prominent speaker for abolition and women's rights. She was also the first Black woman to win a court case against a white man in the United States, recovering her son who had been illegally sold south.

She delivered the speech in question at a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851.

The 1851 account, published in the Anti-Slavery Bugle by Marius Robinson, who was present and knew her, contains no refrain of "Ain't I a woman?" and records her speaking in standard English.

The 1863 version, published by Frances Dana Barker Gage, introduced the repeated refrain and rendered her speech in a heavy Southern dialect — complete with references to having borne thirteen children, where other sources indicate she had around five.

The dialect is the clearest problem. Truth grew up in a Dutch-speaking household in New York; Dutch was her first language, and she never lived in the South. A Southern accent is implausible.

Gage's version became the famous one because it is more dramatic, and it shaped how Truth has been represented ever since.

None of this diminishes her. It is a case of a real and formidable figure being reshaped into a more theatrical version by a sympathetic editor.