My knowledge of the history of the women’s movement in the United States has been limited to an outline of the events of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and a passing familiarity with the work of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott. The Grimké sisters, Angelina and Sarah, abolitionists and campaigners for women’s rights, had been vague figures for me until now.
The history of the Grimkés’ participation in the abolitionist movement, of the origins of the women’s rights movement in abolitionism, and the political shifts that took place among abolitionists and women’s rights advocates over the years makes a dramatic story. First the abolitionist movement split over women’s rights in the years 1837-1840, and then the women’s rights movement became divided over issues of race following the Civil War.
Angelina Grimké (1805-1879) and Sarah Grimké (1792-1873) are the superstars of the early women’s rights movement in Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement 1830-1870: A Brief History with Documents by Kathryn Kish Sklar (2000). Daughters of a South Carolina slave-owning family, the Grimkés left the South and moved to Philadelphia where they became Quakers. On the death of their father, the sisters were women of independent means, able to devote their attention first to their own spiritual development and then to abolitionism.
Initially the sisters concentrated exclusively on religious matters, but in 1835 they joined William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society. On account of their experience as witnesses to the abominable practices of slavery, they were welcome contributors to the abolitionist cause. Angelina joined the movement when Garrison called for the faithful to carry the abolitionist movement to the South. In 1836, she wrote an article for his newspaper, The Liberator, encouraging women in the South to follow the example of British women by petitioning Congress to end slavery. The immediate goal of these petitions was the abolition of slavery in Washington, D.C. Sarah followed with her own anti-slavery tracts.
Before Garrison began calling for racial equality and an immediate end to slavery, many white abolitionists had embraced a "gradualist" approach that involved compensating slave owners for the loss of their human "property" and sending the freed slaves to Africa. Garrison, using Protestant religious rhetoric familiar to the American reading public, "argued that slavery was a sin, because it deprived human beings of the freedom they needed to choose their own salvation."
During the 1830s more free blacks than whites subscribed to Garrison’s paper, and at that time more than 90% of free black men in the North were denied the right to vote. The first American women’s anti-slavery organization, the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, had been formed in 1832 by a group of black women. Maria Stewart, an African-American woman, was the first American woman to speak in public to a mixed audience of men and women, when she spoke in Boston in 1832 on behalf of black civil rights.
In 1836, both of the Grimké sisters broke the taboo of women speaking in public and began speaking about abolition to women’s groups, both small and large. The backlash against the Grimkés’ speaking in public led to the beginning of the women’s rights movement in the United States, when the Grimkés responded to their critics by asserting that women have souls, are spiritually equal to men, and have a responsibility to speak out and petition against slavery. After they were criticized for speaking in public, the Grimkés began to include the subject of women’s rights in their abolitionist lectures.
In 1837, the sisters toured Massachusetts giving abolitionist lectures to audiences that included both women and men. The overwhelming success of this lecture tour led to an increase in membership for the Anti-Slavery Society. Garrison’s group had 100,000 members in 1837, but a year later, following the Grimkés’ speaking tour, membership had grown to 250,000.
A major attack on the Grimkés came from the Congregational minsiters of Massachusetts in the form of a public Pastoral Letter. The clergymen denounced the sisters as "unnatural," as having abandoned their "appropriate duties," threatening "permanent injury" to womanhood, which was in danger of falling "in shame and dishonor into the dust." The sisters defended themselves against this and other attacks and in doing so launched the American women’s rights movement.
At first their arguments were Bible-based, and assertion of their spiritual equality with men was the dominant theme of their women’s rights message. Then they expanded the defense of their right to speak in public, incorporating ideas from the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
At Angelina’s last public lecture in 1838, at a women’s anti-slavery convention in Philadelphia, an anti-abolitionist mob of 10,000 men gathered outside the hall, throwing stones and breaking windows. The next day the mob, especially outraged by the inter-racial composition of the meeting, burned the building to the ground.
The abolitionist movement split into followers of Garrison, who admitted women as voting members in their anti-slavery organization, and other groups that allowed women to participate only in an auxiliary capacity. The historic women’s convention at Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 came about, in part, because a regional Quaker group voted down a proposal "to grant equal power to women and men in local Quaker meetings." Lucretia Mott and friends then began to organize the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention.
Although the Grimkés had added secular arguments in favor of women’s rights to their original religious ones, it was Elizabeth Cady Stanton who began systematically to formulate women’s rights more in legal terms. Daughter of a judge, she was well-informed about the inequities women experienced under the law. The Seneca Falls Declaration reflects her vision of the civil and political approach to women’s rights.
Abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass, an early supporter of women’s rights, attended the Seneca Falls Convention, but he broke with the movement after the Civil War when women wanted to press for the right to vote, while Douglass believed the voting rights of black men should take precedence. He saw the civil rights of black women as part of the larger campaign for African-American rights in general.
Women’s rights conventions continued to be held throughout the 1850s, but they were suspended during the Civil War. Sojourner Truth, whom I usually associate with the abolitionist movement, actually made her first public speech at a women’s rights convention in 1850. After the war, the established networks of the women’s rights convention movement became the basis for the women’s suffrage associations that formed in 1869.
Following the Civil War, the question of the vote for black men divided the women’s movement, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opposing the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which enfranchised black men, but not white or black women. Elizabeth Blackwell and Lucy Stone supported the amendment, and the division in the women’s suffrage movement was not healed until 1890. Women who came to the movement following the Civil War had not necessarily been involved in abolitionism prior to the war, and some of those white women were less interested in civil rights for blacks than their abolitionist sisters had been.
Black women divided in their support for the new suffrage organizations, with Sojourner Truth supporting Stanton and Anthony, while Frances Harper–a leading African-American writer of the 1850s–went with Stone and Blackwell. By 1870, other black women activists such as Ida B. Wells reacted to their marginalized status within the women’s movement by forming their own suffrage associations.
This was a terrific read. Every volume I have read in The Bedford Series in History and Culture has been worthwhile, with half of the book presenting an overview written by a scholar and the second half giving representative documents from the era–letters, speeches, convention notes, etc. Well done. Highly recommended to general readers of history.
Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement 1830-1870: A Brief History with Documents by Kathryn Kish Sklar.
Bedford/St. Martin’s (2000).
216 pages.