Quote by Sojourner Truth: “I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me — and ain't I a woman?”

Truth challenged the assumption that women were fragile and needed protection by pointing to her own physical labor as evidence. She exposed how race made the category of 'woman' apply differently — Black women were expected to work like men but denied women's rights. Exclusion from dignity was the real issue.

Truth delivered this speech at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in May 1851, a decade before the American Civil War. The abolition movement and the women's suffrage movement were beginning to intersect, often uncomfortably, as some white suffragists resisted racial equality. Truth's speech insisted both movements were indivisible.

American abolitionist and women's rights activist who was born into slavery in New York and escaped in 1826. Her 1851 speech Ain't I a Woman, delivered at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, is one of the most powerful statements on the intersection of race and gender in American history.