"Why children, if you have woman’s rights, give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won’t be so much trouble." — Sojourner Truth

After escaping slavery with her infant daughter, Sojourner Truth went on to become a preacher, abolitionist, renowned orator, and women's right advocate. As noted in the new National Endowment for the Arts publication, Creativity and Persistence: Art that Fueled the Fight for Wome's Suffrage, this excerpt is from a speech Truth gave in 1851 at a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio. A newspaper account of the speech said it was “impossible to transfer to paper, or convey any adequate idea of the effect it produced upon the audience.” More than a decade later, suffragist Frances Gage published a different version of the speech, which has come to be called, "Ain't I a Woman?" 

This undated photograph of Sojourner Truth is one of 117 women’s suffrage-related images in Creativity and Persistence: Art that Fueled the Fight for Women's Suffrage, available for download as a PDF or an audiobook.