Sarah And Angelina Grimké: A Feminist Analysis

When examining the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement from a gender perspective, past historians and scholars have primarily focused on the lives and influences of a few, celebrated female characters. For example, abolitionist heroines such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who authored Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Sojourner Truth have received significant attention and achieved revered status among scholars and non-academics alike. However, few individuals beyond the world of academia have heard of America’s first, southern, female abolitionists, Sarah and Angelina Grimké. The Grimké sisters, who belonged to the powerful planter aristocracy in South Carolina, were arguably two of the leading female abolitionists of the pre-Civil War era. They produced …show more content…
Sarah, in particular, struggled to resign herself to these gender based restrictions, particularly in the realm of education. During the earliest years of her education, Sarah had shown an active interest in learning such masculine subjects as geography, advanced mathematics, and natural science. However, young women were highly discouraged from engaging in such strenuous studies due to the delicacy of their feminine minds and natures. Consequently, when Sarah attempted to convince her father to allow her to participate in her older brother Thomas’s Latin lessons, John Grimké vehemently denied her request. Sarah later voiced her frustrations regarding her inadequate education in a moving essay titled “The Education of Women:”
With me, learning was a passion, and under more propitious circumstances, the cultivation of my mind would have superseded every other desire. In vain I entreated permission to go hand in hand with my brothers through their studies. The only answer to my earnest pleadings was ‘You are a girl—what do you want with Latin and Greek…You can never use …show more content…
They became intense activists in the public arena, and authored numerous antislavery pamphlets, letters, essays, and resolutions. In doing so, they sacrificed familial relationships, friendships, personal safety, and their reputations as genteel women. The religious leaders of the Society of Friends, for example, disapproved of Angelina’s published letter and insisted that she recant some of the opinions and sentiments expressed within the letter. When Angelina refused to comply with their demands, the Society condemned her brazen actions and shunned her association. In her diary, Angelina recalled the anguish she experienced at the Society’s condemnation. She lamented, “I was indeed brought to the brink of despair,” but “tho’ I sufferd so deeply I could not blame the publication of my letter, nor would I have recalld it if I could…I felt willing to bear all, if it was only made an instrument of good.” Additionally, Sarah and Angelina’s shockingly public display of their radical beliefs and abolitionist activities appalled their slaveholding relatives in South Carolina, and eventually resulted in a lifelong estrangement between the two women and their