The Grimke sisters, Sarah Moore Grimké (1792–1873) and Angelina Emily GrimkéUnited States National Park Service. "Grimke Sisters." U.S. Department of the Interior, October 8, 2014. Accessed: October 14, 2014. (1805–1879), were American writers, educators, and public speakers, best known for their advocacy of abolitionism and women's rights.Birney, Catherin H. The Grimké Sisters. Kessinger Publishing, LLC (June 17, 2004).
Among the first American-born women to engage in public speaking tours, the sisters advocated through speech and writing for the civil rights of African Americans and civil rights for women, emphasizing the interconnectedness of these struggles. Sarah Grimké's pamphlet, The Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, has been called "the first serious discussion 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's substantial Quaker society in their twenties. The sisters, along with Angelina's husband, Theodore Dwight Weld, founded a private school in 1848 on their farm in Belleville, New Jersey.
Early life, education, and family Sarah Moore Grimké and Angelina Grimké Weld were born in Charleston, South Carolina. Sarah and Angelina's father, Judge John Faucheraud Grimké, was an advocate of slavery. He owned several plantations and hundreds of enslaved people. Grimké had 14 children with his wife Mary (née Smith) and at least three children with enslaved women. Three of his children died in infancy.Pery (2002), p. 24. Sarah was his sixth child with Mary, and Angelina was the thirteenth.Perry (2002), p. xi. In 1783, Judge John Faucheraud Grimké was elected as chief justice of the Supreme Court of South Carolina. In 1810, Sarah and Angelina's uncle, Benjamin Smith, served as governor of North Carolina.
Sarah recalled being skeptical of slavery from a young age. She later recounted that at age five, after witnessing a slave being whipped, she tried to board a steamer to live in a place without slavery. As she grew older, she attempted to teach enslaved people on her father's plantation how to read until her father discovered and forbade the attempts.
In her adolescence, Sarah wanted to become a lawyer and follow in her father's footsteps. She studied the books in her father's library, teaching herself geography, history, and mathematics.Perry (2002), p. 1. However, her father would not allow her to learn Latin or attend law school like her brother, Thomas Smith Grimké, due to institutional restrictions on women receiving higher education. Still, her father admired her intelligence and said that if she had been a man, she would have been the greatest lawyer in South Carolina.Perry (2002), p. 2 Lerner gives a somewhat different version, in which her father said: "she would have made the greatest jurist in the country." Lerner (1998), p. 25.
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." Such relationships were not uncommon at the time; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg writes of boarding school girls "adopting" younger girls who called the older girls "mother."
Sarah became an abolitionist in 1821. Angelina followed her sister and became an active member of the movement. The sisters' conversion to Quakerism and subsequent move to Philadelphia made them virtual outcasts in the South. Angelina rose to notoriety in 1835 when William Lloyd Garrison published a letter of hers in his anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator. In May 1838, she gave a speech to abolitionists, despite a hostile, stone-throwing crowd outside of Pennsylvania Hall. The essays and speeches she produced during this period argued for ending slavery and advancing women's rights.
Before the Civil War, the sisters discovered that their late brother Henry had a relationship with Nancy Weston, an enslaved mixed-race woman,City of Boston website, Stories from Mount Hope: The Amazing Grimké Sisters, by Gretchen Grozier and Sally Ebeling, March 2022. after he became a widower. The two had lived together and had three mixed-race sons: Archibald, Francis, and John (who was born shortly after their father died). The sisters arranged for the oldest two nephews to come north for their 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. A daughter of Archibald, Angelina Weld Grimké, became a noted poet and playwright.
Activism Sarah first encountered the Quakers in 1818 during a trip to Philadelphia for medical care. The Quakers' views on slavery and gender intrigued her, particularly their religious values of sincerity, simplicity, and commitment to equality.
After her father's death that same year, Sarah returned to Charleston, where 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. 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 left Charleston for good in 1821, relocating to Philadelphia, with Angelina joining her in 1829. Britannica website, Grimké sisters There, the sisters became involved in the Quaker community. Angelina's 1835 letter in support of the abolitionist movement to William Lloyd Garrison was published in The Liberator without her permission. Various members of the Quaker community asked Angelina to retract her radical statements, but she refused to change a word or remove her name from the letter.
Because of the Quakers' strict adherence to traditional manners and the expectation that individuals defer to the congregation before taking public action, both sisters were rebuked by the Quaker community. As the Grimké sisters' fame spread, a backlash against them grew. Many people were unhappy to see women taking a public role in social and political debates. They felt Sarah and Angelina were stepping too far outside of the behavior of "respectable women." Despite this rebuke, Sarah and Angelina were embraced by the wider abolitionist movement and started actively working to oppose slavery.
Leaving the Quaker community seemed to free both sisters of the many restrictions in their lives. They quickly channeled their physical and intellectual energy into activism. Abolitionist Theodore Weld, who would later marry Angelina in May of 1838, trained the sisters to be abolition speakers. In 1836, Sarah was rebuked by the Quakers again when she tried to discuss abolition in a meeting. When the Grimké sisters saw that black Quakers were segregated in the Philadelphia meeting house, they became disillusioned with Quakers.
The activism of the Grimké sisters was promoted by pastor Henry G. Ludlow. In 1837, they spoke at his Spring Street Presbyterian Church.
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 exclusively to women at parlor meetings or sewing circles, adhering to contemporary rules of gender propriety. In one case, an interested man snuck into the meeting but was subsequently removed.
Angelina Grimké wrote her first tract, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, in 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 arguing that slavery was contrary to both the teachings of Jesus Christ and the United States Declaration of Independence statement that "all men are created equal." 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 again sparked controversy when Sarah published Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States in 1836 and Angelina republished her Appeal in 1837. That year, they went on a lecture tour to address Congregationalist churches in the Northeast United States. In addition to denouncing slavery, the sisters condemned 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 sisters' determination.Mass Moments website, Angelina Grimke Addresses Legislature Responding to Catharine Beecher's criticism of 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. By the end of 1836, the sisters were denounced from Congregationalist pulpits. The following year, Sarah responded to the Congregationalist ministers' attacks by writing her own 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 and Angelina's husband, Theodore Weld, published American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses.National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum website, Angelina Grimké Weld. For a time, Sarah, Angelina, and Theodore lived on a farm in New Jersey. The sisters taught at Eagleswood Military Academy, a coeducational and racially integrated school located at the Raritan Bay Union cooperative. The school was run by Theodore.New Jersey Women's History website, Angelina Grimke Weld.When Sarah was nearly 80, the sisters attempted to vote to test the 15th Amendment but were unsuccessful.City of Boston website, Stories from Mount Hope: The Amazing Grimké Sisters, by Gretchen Grozier and Sally Ebeling, March 2022. Sarah Grimké died on December 23, 1873, in Suffolk, Massachusetts. The following year, Angelina suffered a paralyzing stroke that affected her until her death in 1879. At her own request, Angelina's grave was unmarked until the Hyde Park Historical Society installed a flat gravestone for her in 2021.
Selections from writings