GRIMKÉ, ANGELINA and GRIMKÉ, SARAH

(Angelina: 1805-1879; Sarah: 1792-1873), abolitionists and advocates of woman's rights. The Grimké sisters, born and raised in South Carolina, were the daughters of a slave-owning judge and planter and the only white southern women to become leading abolitionists. Unwilling to accommodate to life in a slave society, they moved to Philadelphia and joined the Society of Friends.

Angelina became publicly associated with the abolitionist cause in 1835, when a letter she had written to William Lloyd Garrison supporting his views was published in Garrison's paper, the Liberator. Her Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836) was a unique attempt to draw southern white women into the antislavery cause. As a result of its wide distribution in the North by the American Anti-Slavery Society, she was invited by that group to give public lectures to antislavery women.

Having converted Sarah to an organizational commitment, Angelina with her sister moved to New York City, where they became the first female agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society; their lectures drew large "mixed" audiences of men and women. They played a leading role in the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in 1837, especially in introducing resolutions against race prejudice. Their early pamphlets, Angelina's Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States and Sarah's Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States (both 1836), were published by the American Anti-Slavery Society. The sisters undertook a lecture tour in New England in 1837-1838, which culminated in Angelina's testimony before the Massachusetts legislature. The first American woman to address a legislative body, she presented tens of thousands of antislavery petitions that had been collected by women. The tour resulted in the formation of dozens of female antislavery societies and in the launching of a mass petitioning campaign by women, which prepared the ground for later antislavery political organization.

The sisters were attacked in the press and from the pulpit, and even by many male abolitionists for daring, as women, to speak in public; but they persisted. Angelina's Letters to Catharine Beecher (1838) was a spirited defense of abolitionism and women's moral responsibility for leadership. Sarah's Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women (1838) was the first comprehensive feminist argument presented by an American woman, ten years before the Seneca Falls convention. A highly original contribution to the development of feminist thought, it marks Sarah Grimké as an important theorist and pioneer of feminism.

After Angelina's marriage to the abolitionist Theodore Weld, the couple and Sarah, who made her home with them, moved to Raritan Bay, New Jersey. They collaborated on a documentary indictment of slavery, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839), which was the most important antislavery publication before Uncle Tom's Cabin, for which it served as a source. Raising the Welds' three children, the sisters devoted the rest of their lives to schoolteaching, first in a communal settlement at Raritan Bay and then in Hyde Park, Massachusetts. Both remained active in the causes of abolition and woman's rights. Late in life, after discovering the existence of two black nephews, sons of their brother Henry and one of his slaves, the sisters adopted the young men into their family and helped finance their education.

Contemporaries acclaimed them primarily as abolitionists, but Sarah and Angelina Grimké's significance as pioneers of woman's rights, both in theory and in practice, assured them a place of honor in the struggle for woman's rights as well.

Gerda Lerner

See also Abolitionist Movement; Feminist Movement.