Grimké sisters

Sarah Moore Grimké

Angelina Emily Grimké

The Grimké sisters, Sarah Moore Grimké (1792–1873) and Angelina Emily Grimké (1805–1879) were the first nationally known white American female advocates of abolitionism and women's rights. Both sisters were speakers, writers, and educators. They led the way for women's public participation in politics.

The Grimké sisters remain known as important women in the abolition movement and as some of the first American-born women to make a public speaking tour. Sarah and Angelina discerned the connection between the struggles for civil rights for African Americans and civil rights for women. Sarah Grimké's pamphlet, The Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, has been called one of the most prominent discussions of women's rights by an American woman.

The sisters grew up in a slave-owning family in South Carolina and became part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania's substantial Quaker society in their twenties. They were also early activists in the women's rights movement. Sarah and Angelina founded a private school in 1848 on their farm in Belleville, New Jersey, with Angelina's husband Theodore Dwight Weld.

After discovering that their late brother had three mixed-race sons with one of his slaves, Sarah and Angelina helped the boys receive an education in the North. Their older nephews Archibald and Francis J. Grimké stayed in the North, and Francis became a Presbyterian minister. Their youngest nephew, John, returned to the South.

Early life and education

Sarah and Angelia's father, Judge John Faucheraud Grimké, was an advocate of slavery and a planter who owned several successful plantations and hundreds of slaves. Grimké had 14 children with his wife Mary (née Smith) and had at least three children with enslaved women. Three of his children died in infancy. Sarah was the sixth child, and Angelina was the thirteenth. John Grimké in 1783 was elected chief judge of the Supreme Court of South Carolina. In 1810, Sarah and Angelina's uncle, Benjamin Smith, served as governor of North Carolina.

Sarah said that at age five after witnessing a slave being whipped, she tried to board a steamer to live in a place without slavery. Later, in violation of the law, she taught one of her father's slaves to read.

In adolescence, Sarah wanted to become a lawyer and follow in her father's footsteps. She studied the books in her father's library constantly, teaching herself geography, history, and mathematics. However, her father would not allow her to learn Latin or go to college with her brother, Thomas, who was attending Yale Law School. Still, her father commended her intelligence and told her that had she been a man, she would have been the greatest lawyer in South Carolina.

After completing her studies, Sarah begged her parents to allow her to become Angelina's godmother. Sarah served as a role model to Angelina, and the two sisters maintained a close relationship throughout their lives. Angelina often referred to Sarah as "mother."

Sarah became an abolitionist in 1821. Angelina followed her sister, becoming a more active member of movement. Angelina's greatest fame was between 1835, when William Lloyd Garrison published a letter of hers in his anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, and on May 1838, when she gave a speech to abolitionists with a hostile, noisy, stone-throwing crowd outside Pennsylvania Hall. The essays and speeches she produced in that period were incisive arguments to end slavery and to advance women's rights.

Social activism

Sarah encountered the Quakers in 1818, during a trip to Philadelphia with her father for medical care. The Quakers' views on slavery and gender intrigued her, particularly their religious sincerity, simplicity, and unwavering commitment to equality. Their outspoken disapproval of gender inequality and slavery deeply resonated with her personal beliefs.

After her father’s death that same year, Sarah returned to Charleston. During this time, her anti-slavery sentiments deepened significantly, and her abolitionist beliefs began to take root. These evolving views profoundly influenced her sister Angelina, who would later join her in advocating for abolition and gender equality.

Sarah left Charleston for good in 1821 and relocated to Philadelphia, where Angelina joined her in 1829. There, the sisters became involved in the Quaker community. In 1835, Angelina wrote a letter in support of the abolitionist movement to William Lloyd Garrison, editor and publisher of The Liberator, which he published without her permission. Various members of the Quaker society asked Angelina to retract her radical statements, but she refused to change a word or remove her name from the letter. Due to the Quakers' strict adherence to traditional manners and expectation that individuals defer to the congregation before taking public action, both sisters were rebuked by the Quaker community. Despite this rebuke, Sarah and Angelina were embraced by the abolitionist movement and started actively working to oppose slavery.

Alice S. Rossi writes that this choice "seemed to free both sisters from a rapidly escalating awareness of the many restrictions upon their lives. Their physical and intellectual energies were soon fully expanded, as though they and their ideas had been suddenly released after a long period of germination." Abolitionist Theodore Weld, who would later marry Angelina in May of 1838, trained the sisters to be abolition speakers. In February 1828, Angelina became the first woman to address the Massachusetts State Legislature when she brought an anti-slavery petition signed by 20,000 women to the governing body.

Sarah was rebuked by the Quakers again in 1836 when she tried to discuss abolition in a meeting. Following the earlier example of African-American orator Maria W. Stewart of Boston, the Grimké sisters were among the first female public speakers in the United States. They first spoke to "parlor meetings" or "sewing circles" of women only, adhering to contemporary rules of gender propriety. In one case, an interested man snuck into the meeting but was consequently removed. The sisters gained attention due to their background of coming from a wealthy slaveholding planter family, which gave them a unique perspective within the abolitionist sphere.

As they attracted larger audiences, the Grimké sisters began to speak in front of mixed-gender and mixed-race audiences. They challenged social conventions in two ways: first, speaking for the antislavery movement at a time when it was not popular to do so, and second, the very act of their public speaking was criticized, as it was not believed to be suitable for women.

Angelina Grimké wrote her first tract, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836), to encourage Southern women to join the abolitionist movement for the sake of white womanhood and black slaves. Addressing Southern women, she began her piece by demonstrating that slavery was contrary to the United States' Declaration of Independence and "the teachings of Christ". She discussed the damage both to slaves and to society, advocated teaching slaves to read, and urged her readers to free any slaves they might own. Although legal codes of slave states restricted or prohibited the latter two actions, Angelina urged her readers to ignore wrongful laws and do what was right: "Consequences, my friends, belong no more to you than they did to [the] apostles. Duty is ours, and events are God's." At the end of the tract, Angelina delivered a call to action, encouraging her readers to "arise and gird yourselves for this great moral conflict."

The sisters created more controversy when Sarah published Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States (1836) and Angelina republished her Appeal in 1837. That year they went on a lecture tour to address Congregationalist churches in the Northeast. In addition to denouncing slavery, the sisters denounced racial prejudice and argued that white women had a natural bond with enslaved black women, two ideas that were extreme, even for radical abolitionists. Their public speaking for the abolitionist cause continued to draw criticism, with each attack fueling the Grimké sisters' determination. Responding to an attack by Catharine Beecher on her public speaking, Angelina wrote a series of letters to Beecher – later published with the title Letters to Catharine Beecher – staunchly defending the abolitionist cause and her right to speak publicly for the cause. By the end of 1836, the sisters were being denounced from Congregationalist pulpits. The following year, Sarah responded to the ministers' attacks by writing a series of letters addressed to the president of the abolitionist society that sponsored their speeches. The series became known as Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, in which she defended women's right to the public platform. By 1838, thousands of people came to hear their Boston lecture series.

In 1839, the sisters (with Angelina's husband Weld) published American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, a collection of eyewitness testimonies and advertisements from Southern newspapers.

Weld was often away from home, either on the lecture circuit or in Washington, D.C., until financial pressures in 1854 forced him to take up a more lucrative profession. For a time, Sarah, Angelina, and Weld lived on a farm in New Jersey and operated a boarding school, establishing the Eagleswood Military Academy at the Raritan Bay Union cooperative.

Sarah's Headstone

Before the Civil War, the sisters discovered that their late brother Henry had had a relationship with Nancy Weston, an enslaved mixed-race woman, after he became a widower. They lived together and had three mixed-race sons: Archibald, Francis, and John (who was born only a couple of months after their father died). The sisters arranged for the oldest two nephews to come north for education and helped support them. Francis J. Grimké became a Presbyterian minister who graduated from Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) and Princeton Theological Seminary. In December 1878, Francis married Charlotte Forten, a noted educator and author. The couple had one daughter, Theodora Cornelia, who died as an infant. Archibald also graduated from Lincoln University, followed by Harvard Law School; he served as American Consul to the Dominican Republic from 1894 to 1898. The daughter of Archibald, Angelina Weld Grimké (named after her aunt), became a noted poet.

When Sarah was nearly 80, the sisters attempted to vote in order to test the 15th Amendment, but they were unsuccessful.

Sarah Grimké died on 23 December 1873 in Suffolk, Massachusetts. The following year, in 1874, Angelina suffered a paralyzing stroke which afflicted her until her death. Her grave was unmarked at her own request, until quite recently when one was finally erected.

Selections from writings

Angelina published her Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836) before Sarah's similar work. Both stories emphasize the equality of men and women's creation but Sarah also discusses Adam's greater responsibility for the Fall of man. To her, Eve, innocent of the ways of evil, was tempted by the crafty serpent while Adam was tempted by a mere mortal. Because of the supernatural nature of her tempter, Eve's sinfulness can be more easily forgiven. Further, Adam should have tenderly reproved his wife and led them both away from sin. Hence, Adam failed in two ways. By analyzing the Hebrew text and by comparing the phrasing used there with the phrasing used in the story of Cain and Abel, Sarah found that God's "curse" is not actually a curse, but a prophecy. Her concluding thought asserts that women are bound to God alone.

From Angelina Grimké's "Letter XII Human Rights Not Founded on Sex" (October 2, 1837):

The concept of assigning distinct duties and virtues based on sex rather than fundamental moral principles has been criticized for fostering societal inequalities. Historically, this belief has often framed men as warriors with qualities such as strength and authority, while women were expected to embody dependence, beauty, and subservience. This dichotomy has been argued to perpetuate harmful stereotypes, reducing women to roles that either prioritize their physical appeal or subject them to servitude. Critics suggest that this dynamic has allowed for the systemic marginalization of women, denying them equal opportunities to engage in intellectual and moral discourse and diminishing their capacity to act as autonomous individuals. From a theological perspective, some interpretations of religious texts emphasize the equality of men and women as creations in the image of God, endowed with similar dignity and moral responsibilities. For instance, the Biblical passage in Genesis 1:27–28 describes both men and women as stewards of creation, implying equality in their divine purpose. Critics of patriarchal traditions argue that portraying women as subordinate to men distorts these principles, undermining their inherent rights and individuality. Instead of being recognized as equals and collaborators, women have often been relegated to roles that prioritize male authority, ultimately eroding their societal and spiritual agency.

Additionally, Angelina wrote: "...whatever is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do. I recognise no rights but human rights – I know nothing of men's rights and women's rights; for in Christ Jesus, there is neither male nor female."

I prize the purity of his character as highly as I do that of hers. As a moral being, whatever it is morally wrong for her to do, it is morally wrong for him to do.

From Sarah Grimké's "Letter 1: The Original Equality of Woman" July 11, 1837. Sarah precedes the following quote with the comment that all translations are corrupt, and the only inspired versions of the Bible are in the original languages.

We must first view woman at the period of her creation. "And God said, Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them." In all this sublime description of the creation of man, (which is a difference intimated as existing between them). They were both made in the image of God; dominion was given to both over every other creature, but not over each other. Created in perfect equality, they were expected to exercise the vicegerency entrusted to them by their Maker, in harmony and love.

Let us pass on now to the recapitulation of the creation of man: "The Lord god formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the Lord God said, it is not good that man should be alone, I will make him an help meet for him." All creation swarmed with animated beings capable of natural affection, as we know they still are; it was not, therefore, merely to give man a creature susceptible of loving, obeying, and looking up to him, for all that the animals could do and did do. It was to give him a companion, in all respects his equal; one who was like himself a free agent, gifted with intellect and endowed with immortality; not a partaker merely of his animal gratifications, but able to enter into all his feelings as a moral and responsible being. If this had not been the case, how could she have been a help meet for him? I understand this as applying not only to the parties entering into the marriage contract, but to all men and women, because I believe God designed woman to be a help meet for man in every good and perfect work. She was part of himself, as if Jehovah designed to make the oneness and identity of man and woman perfect and complete; and when the glorious work of their creation was finished, "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.

This blissful condition was not long enjoyed by our first parents. Eve, it would seem from history, was wandering alone amid the bowers of Paradise, when the serpent met with her. From her reply to Satan, it is evident that the command not to eat "of the tree that is in the midst of the garden," was given to both, although the term man was used when the prohibition was issued by God. "And the woman said unto the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall Ye touch it, lest Ye die." Here the woman was exposed to temptation from a being with whom she was unacquainted. She had been accustomed to associate with her beloved partner, and to hold communion with God and with angels; but of satanic intelligence, she was in all probability entirely ignorant. Through the subtlety of the serpent, she was beguiled. And "when she saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat.

We next find Adam involved in the same sin, not through the instrumentality of a super-natural agent, but through that of his equal, a being whom he must have known was liable to transgress the divine command, because he must have felt that he was himself a free agent, and that he was restrained from disobedience only by the exercise of faith and love towards his Creator. Had Adam tenderly reproved his wife, and endeavoured to lead her to repentance instead of sharing in her guilt, I should be much more ready to accord to man that superiority which he claims; but as the facts stand disclosed by the sacred historian, it appears to men that to say the least, there was as much weakness exhibited by Adam as by Eve. They both fell from innocence, and consequently from happiness, but not from equality.

Let us next examine the conduct of this fallen pair, when Jehovah interrogated them respecting their fault. They both frankly confessed their guilt. "The man said, the woman who thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I did eat. And the woman said, the serpent beguiled men and I did eat." And the Lord God said unto the woman, "Thou wilt be subject unto they husband, and he will rule over thee." That this did not allude to the subjection of woman to man is manifest, because the same mode of expression is used in speaking to Cain of Abel. The truth is that the curse, as it is termed, which was pronounced by Jehovah upon woman, is a simple prophecy. The Hebrew, like the French language, uses the same word to express shall and will. Our translators having been accustomed to exercise their lordship over their wives, and seeing only through the medium of a perverted judgment, very naturally, though I think not very learnedly or very kindly, translated it shall instead of will, and thus converted a prediction to Eve into a command to Adam; for observe, it is addressed to the woman and not to the man. the consequence of the fall was an immediate struggle for dominion, and Jehovah foretold which would gain the ascendancy; but as he created them in his image, as that image manifestly was not lost by the fall, because it is urged in Gen 9:6, as an argument why the life of man should not be taken by his fellow man, there is no reason to suppose that sin produced any distinction between them as moral, intellectual, and responsible beings. Man might just as well have endeavoured by hard labor to fulfil the prophecy, thorns and thistles will the earth bring forth to thee, as to pretend to accomplish the other, "he will rule over thee," by asserting dominion over his wife.

Authority usurped from God, not give.
He gave him only over beast, flesh, fowl,
Dominion absolute: that right he holds
By God's donation: but man o'er woman
He made not Lord, such title to himself
Reserving, human left from human free,

Here then I plant myself. God created us equal; – he created us free agents; – he is our Lawgiver, our King, and our Judge, and to him alone is woman bound to be in subjection, and to him alone is she accountable for the use of those talents with which Her Heavenly Father has entrusted her. One is her Master even Christ.

In response to a letter from a group of ministers who cited the Bible to reprimand the sisters for stepping out of "woman's proper sphere," Sarah Grimké wrote the following in Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman in 1838.

She asserts that “men and women were CREATED EQUAL.... Whatever is right for a man, it's right for a woman. I will not seek any sex-related favors. I will not surrender our right to equality. All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet off our necks and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God destined us to occupy.”

Legacy

• In 1880, Theodore Weld published a volume titled In Memory: Angelina Grimké Weld.
• The first volume of History of Woman Suffrage, published in 1881, is inscribed to the memory of the Grimké sisters, among others.
• In 1973 Ruth Bader Ginsburg quoted Sarah Grimké as saying, "I ask for no favour for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks," when Ginsburg gave her first oral arguments to the Supreme Court in Frontiero v. Richardson; the quote was also recited by an actress playing Ginsburg in the film RBG (2018).
• The Grimké sisters and Theodore Dwight Weld are featured prominently in the juvenile fiction book The Forge and the Forest (1975) by Betty Underwood.
• Angelina Grimké is memorialized in Judy Chicago's 1979 artwork The Dinner Party.
• In 1998, the Grimké sisters were inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
• The Grimké sisters appear as main characters in Ain Gordon's 2013 play If She Stood, commissioned by the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
• Sue Monk Kidd's 2014 novel The Invention of Wings is based on the life of Sarah Grimké.
• In 2016 Angelina Grimké was inducted into the National Abolition Hall of Fame.
• "The Grimké Sisters at Work on Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery As It Is (1838)" is a poem by Melissa Range, published in the September 30, 2019, issue of The Nation.
• In November 2019, a newly reconstructed bridge over the Neponset River in Hyde Park was renamed for the Grimké sisters. It is now known as the Grimké Sisters Bridge.
• The Grimké sisters are remembered on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.

Archival material

The papers of the Grimké family are in the South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, South Carolina. The Weld–Grimké papers are in the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Papers of Sarah Grimké are held by the University of Texas Library, Austin, Texas. The Library of Congress holds 5 letters from Sarah Grimké to Sarah Mapps Douglass.

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Birney, Catherine H. (1885). The Grimké Sisters. Sarah and Angelina Grimké, The First American Women Advocates of Abolition and Woman's Rights. Boston, Massachusetts: Lee and Shepard.
• Ceplair, Larry, Editor. The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké: Selected Writings 1835–1839. Columbia University Press, New York, 1989.
• Weld, Angelina Grimké (1837). Letters to Catharine E. Beecher, in reply to "An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, addressed to A. E. Grimké". Revised by the author. Boston, Massachusetts: Isaac Knapp.
• Grimké, Sarah (1838). Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman. Addressed to Mary S. Parker, President of the Boston Female anti-Slavery Society. Boston, Massachusetts: Isaac Knapp.
• Lerner, Gerda, The Grimke Sisters From South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition. New York, Schocken Books, 1971 and The University of North Carolina Press, Cary, North Carolina, 1998. ISBN 0-19-510603-2.
• Perry, Mark E. Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimke Family's Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders. New York: Viking Penguin, 2002 ISBN 0-14-200103-1.
• U.S. National Park Service. "Grimke Sisters" Women's Rights National Historic Park website, U.S. Department of the Interior.
• [Weld, Theodore Dwight] (1880). In Memory. Angelina Grimké Weld [In Memory of Sarah Moore Grimké]. Boston, Massachusetts: "Printed Only for Private Circulation" [Theodore Dwight Weld].
• Willimon, William H. Turning the World Upside Down; the story of Sarah and Angelina Grimké. Sandlapper Press, 1972.

Further reading

External videos
Presentation by Greenidge on The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, November 15, 2022, C-SPAN

• Greenidge, Kerri K. (2022). The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family. Book reviewed in New York Times Book Review, October 29, 2022. Liveright. ISBN 978-1-324-09084-7.

External links

• Letters on the Equality of the Sexes; Letters to Catharine E. Beecher, Sunshine for Women, 2000
• An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States, Sarah Grimké, 1836
• Grimké sisters’ anti-slavery message revived in Massachusetts state house, NECN.com
• Angelina and Sarah Grimke: Abolitionist Sisters. Archived 2010-04-13 at the Wayback Machine by Carol Berkin, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
• Appeal to Christian Women of the South by Angelina Emily Grimke. Archived 2021-04-18 at the Wayback Machine