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          ** UNIT PAGES **     Visit the Retiree Resource page for links to the CWA Retired Members' Council and related websites 
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Sojourner Truth, born Isabella Van Wagenen in New York at the end of the 18th century, was a slave until the state's anti-slavery law was passed in 1827. Tall with a low but powerful voice and sharp intellect, she became one of America's outstanding orators. She used her skills to demand women's rights, labor reform and prison reform. During the Civil War, she worked in Union army hospitals and camps for freed slaves. Later she campaigned for free land in the West where newly freed blacks could resettle. Though the campaign failed, her efforts encouraged many Southern blacks to migrate to Kansas and Missouri. She died in 1883. "Ain't I a woman" was one of her most famous speeches, given at the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. She said: "Nobody every helped me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place, and ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could heed me - and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and bear the lash as well - and ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen 'em mos' all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard - and ain't I a woman? "Then they talk about this thing in the head - what they call it? Intellect. That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or nigger's rights... Then that little man in black there, he say women can't have as much rights as man, cause Christ wasn't a woman. Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him.
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