Top Highlights

• Isabella won her case—one of the first brought by a black woman in the United States—and had her child returned from Alabama on grounds of established habeas corpus rights.
• Truth’s lawsuit is a testament not only to her tenacity, but also to antebellum America’s commitment to justice under the law.
• The speech is a teacher’s dream: it is short, on-the-nose, and conveniently includes some third-person narration to explain the parts where Truth cows the hostile men in her audience.
• Behind the famous fake is a prominent white feminist of the nineteenth century, Frances Dana Barker Gage, who wrote “Ain’t I a Woman?” twelve years after the fact.
• However, there are two radically different versions of the speech

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