Sarah and Angelina Grimké

American abolitionists and women’s rights activists

• Angelina Grimké
• Born: 1805
• Died: 1879

• Sarah Grimké
• Born: 1792
• Died: 1873

After renouncing their family’s social class, southern traditions, and proslavery views, the Grimké sisters became the first prominent white female abolitionists in the United States. They were criticized for speaking against slavery to groups mixing men and women, and this criticism helped make them leading advocates for women’s rights.

Early Lives

The sixth of fourteen children, Sarah Moore Grimké (grihm-KAY) was the daughter of John Faucheraud Grimké, a respected South Carolinalawyer, accomplished politician, and wealthy plantation owner. Sarah’s mother, Mary “Polly” Smith Grimké, was a leading socialite from a prominent Charleston family. As members of Charleston’s elite, the Grimkés were both devout members of the Episcopal Church and staunch supporters of slavery.

Educated at home, Sarah was bright, inquisitive, and studious. She admired her father and spent many hours in the family library reading his law books. John Grimké encouraged his daughter’s intellectual development but drew the line when she expressed a desire to become a lawyer herself. Societal norms dictated that a young woman accept the traditional role of wife and mother. Sarah not only chafed under such expectations, but she also rebelled against the idea that slaves should not be educated. When she was eleven, her father punished her for teaching a young slave girl to read, an illegal act in the antebellum South. Sarah also rejected the prevailing view of the religious establishment that Christian Scripture sanctioned slavery and refused to become a member of the Episcopal Church.

Sarah’s sister Angelina, who was thirteen years her junior, came to share her unconventional views on slavery. Angelina looked upon her older sister as a substitute mother in place of her real mother, who was distant and difficult. The two girls grew inseparable, and Angelina adopted many of the same attitudes toward religion and slavery that her sister had. Her views were cemented when she was a student at the elite Charleston Seminary. When a recently flogged slave boy entered her classroom to open the windows, his bloody wounds so sickened Angelina that she fainted. The image of the boy’s lashed body haunted her through the rest of her life.

Lives’ Work

In 1819, when Sarah was about twenty-seven, she traveled to Philadelphia with her ailing father to consult with medical specialists about his condition. While she was there, she became acquainted with the Quakers, whose abolitionist stance appealed to her. After her father’s death in New Jersey, Sarah briefly returned to Charleston, but the rift between her and the rest of her family had become too great for her to stay with them. In 1822, she returned to Philadelphia permanently and became involved in the Fourth and Arch Street meeting of Quakers. Angelina adopted her sister’s Quaker faith and abolitionist views, but remained in Charleston. Her outspoken activism and rebellious nature also damaged her relationship with other members of her family, especially her mother, and in 1829, she moved north to Philadelphia to live with Sarah.

The Grimké sisters began to be recognized as leaders in the national abolitionist movement after joining the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society in 1835. As they gained a reputation as ardent and articulate opponents of slavery, New York abolitionists invited them to give “parlor talks” to small groups of women. These gatherings were so popular that the sisters soon moved into larger venues, where they addressed hundreds of women at a time. New England activists took note of the sisters’ growing influence and invited them to speak in Boston in 1837. The meetings were geared toward women, but men began to attend as well. The sisters were criticized for speaking to mixed groups, most notably by Catharine Beecher , who, in “An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism with Reference to the Duty of American Females,” took the sisters to task for overstepping accepted social boundaries that restricted women to the domestic sphere. In response, Angelina wrote “Letters to Catherine Beecher,” in which she equated the silencing of women with the subjugation of slaves.

One of the most notable events during the Grimké sisters’ stay in Massachusetts took place in February, 1837, when Angelina became the first woman to address the state legislature. The public attention that the sisters received continued to draw the ire of critics, both inside and outside the abolitionist movement. In a pastoral letter issued by the Council of Congregationalist Ministers of Massachusetts, the Grimkés were censured for violating New Testament strictures and societal norms regarding proper womanly behavior. Sarah fired back with the first feminist manifesto published in the United States. Appearing in both the Boston Spectator and William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, Sarah’s “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women” deplored “the servitude of women,” rejected biblical patriarchy, condemned marriage as an oppressive institution, argued for equal pay for equal work, and supported equal education for women. This essay profoundly influenced women’s rights advocates of the time, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.

Although Angelina also supported the struggle for women’s rights, she considered slavery the more urgent issue. In October, 1836, she wrote “An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States.” This thirty-six-page document is unique in the history of the antislavery movement because it was written by a southern woman for other southern women from slaveholding families like her own. Using a religious approach, Angelina’s appeal branded slavery a sin and assured women that if they were to rise up against “the peculiar institution,” their voices would be heard above those of men—a shocking idea at a time when women had no political power. Although Angelina’s appeal did not produce the response from southern women for which she had hoped, it did mobilize many northern women to work against slavery by convincing them that they had the power to change society.

After Angelina married fellow abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld in 1838, the sisters retired from the lecture circuit but not from activism. They helped Weld gather information for his influential volume American Slavery as It Is , which was published in 1839. Among the book’s readers was Harriet Beecher Stowe—a sister of Catharine Beecher—who drew on the book for her famous antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly (1852).

In 1868, the sisters’ concern for the plight of former slaves took a personal turn when they discovered that their brother Henry had fathered three sons with his slave Nancy Weston. Sarah and Angelina welcomed their mixed-race nephews into the family, providing them with love and financial support. After moving to Boston during the 1860’s, the sisters continued to agitate for women’s rights. On March 7, 1870, when Sarah was seventy-eight and Angelina was sixty-five, they held a demonstration promoting woman suffrage at a polling place in Hyde Park, a suburb of Boston. Sarah died three years later at the age of eighty-one. After suffering several strokes, Angelina died in 1879 at the age of seventy-four.

Significance

As crusaders and political reformers, Sarah and Angelina Grimké set the stage for both the Civil Rights movement and feminist revolution of the twentieth century by pioneering approaches to activism that have become commonplace in modern culture. For example, because their views on abolition were rooted in their Christian religion, they understood that people of faith could be a powerful force for political and social change. Angelina’s “Appeals” reflected this view. Similarly, the mobilization of churchgoers and clergy during the 1960’s was crucial to the success of the modern Civil Rights movement. In addition, the sisters understood that to gain adherents to a cause one must appeal to the heart as well as to the mind. They pioneered the tools of grassroots activism, including manifestos, pamphlets, petitions, direct fund-raising, rallies, and public speaking—approaches that are commonplace today among contemporary social and political activists.

The Grimké sisters were also among the first American activists to perceive that, given the chance, women could become a potent political force in their own right. When they spoke in front of mixed audiences, their appearances on podiums gave women a public voice for the first time and set the tone for the next eighty years as women fought to gain the vote. Their radical vision of social change defined the struggle for equal rights for women and foreshadowed the modern women’s movement.

Bibliography

Browne, Stephen Howard. Angelina Grimké: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000. In this first full-length study of Angelina’s letters and speeches, Browne argues that she used rhetoric not only to perfect her message but also to forge her identity as a moral force.

Ceplair, Larry, ed. The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké: Selected Writings, 1835-1839. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Accompanied by an informative critical introduction by Ceplair, this collection of letters, diaries, and speeches produced by the Grimké sisters includes writings that document their activism in women’s rights.

Durso, Pamela. The Power of Woman: The Life and Writings of Sarah Moore Grimké. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2004. The first book-length treatment showing how religion and faith influenced Sarah Grimké’s life and work.

Lerner, Gerda. The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. A traditional biography illuminating the contributions of the Grimké sisters to the abolitionist and feminist movements during the nineteenth century. Includes selected speeches and essays.

Perry, Mark. Lift Up Thy Voice. New York: Viking Press, 2001. A well-researched biography focusing on the activism of the Grimké sisters, as well as the accomplishments of their three nephews who were born to their brother Henry Grimké and his slave mistress.