‘If women want any rights more than they’s got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it?’

“If women want any rights more than they’s got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it?” Sojourner Truth is recorded saying this on the women’s-rights circuit in the 1850s, though it reaches us the way nearly all her words do — secondhand, and rendered in a Southern dialect she never spoke. She was born into slavery around 1797 in Dutch-speaking Ulster County, New York, and Dutch was her first language. In 1828, two years after walking away from her owner carrying her infant daughter, she sued in a New York court to recover her five-year-old son Peter, illegally sold south to Alabama — and won.