Sarah Grimké

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Sarah Moore Grimké (November 26, 1792 - December 23, 1873) was born in South Carolina, the daughter of John Faucheraud Grimké, a plantation owner who was also an attorney and a judge in South Carolina.

Without question, Sarah’s early experiences with education shaped her future as an abolitionist and suffragist. Throughout her childhood, she was keenly aware of the inferiority of her own education when compared to her brothers’ Classical one, and despite the fact that all around her recognized her remarkable intelligence and abilities as an orator, she was prevented from substantive education or from pursuing her dream of becoming an attorney.

Perhaps because she felt so confined herself, Sarah expressed a sense of connection with the slaves to such an extent that her parents were unsettled. From the time she was twelve years old, Sarah spent her Sunday afternoons teaching Bible classes to the young slaves on the plantation, and she found it an extremely frustrating experience. While she wanted desperately to teach them to read the scripture for themselves, and they had a longing for such learning, she was refused. Her parents claimed that literacy would only make the slaves unhappy and rebellious; they also suggested that mental exertion would make them unfit for physical labor. And then, of course, teaching slaves to read was against the law. After all, as early as 1740, teaching slaves to read was a serious offense in South Carolina.

She secretly taught her personal slave to read and write, but when her parents discovered the young tutor at work, the vehemence of her father’s response proved alarming. He was furious and nearly had the young slave girl whipped. Fear of causing such trouble for the slaves themselves prevented Sarah from undertaking such a task again.

When her brother Thomas went off to law school at Yale, Sarah remained at home. Her father remarked that if Sarah had only been a boy, "she would have made the greatest jurist in the country" (Lerner, p. 25). Not only did the denial of education seem unfair, Sarah was further perplexed that while her parents and others within the community encouraged slaves to be baptized and to attend worship services, these believers were not viewed as true brothers and sisters in faith.

From her youth, Sarah determined that religion should take a more proactive role in improving the lives of those who suffered most; this was one of the key reasons she later joined the Quaker community where she became an outspoken advocate for education and suffrage for African-Americans and women.

In 1821, after her father had died, Sarah Grimké moved to Philadelphia, a place where she had earlier become acquainted with The Society of Friends Quakers, there choosing to leave her Episcopalian upbringing behind, she became a Quaker. She returned to Charleston, South Carolina a few years later and convinced her sister, Angelina Grimké, to convert to the Quaker faith. Angelina joined her sister in Philadelphia in 1829.

These South Carolinian women, daughters of slave owning plantation owners, had come to loathe slavery and all its degradations that they knew intimately. They hoped that their new faith would be more accepting of their abolitionist beliefs than had been their former. However, their initial attempts to attack slavery caused them difficulties in the Quaker community. Nevertheless, the sisters persisted despite the additional complication caused by the belief that the fight for women's rights was as important as the fight to abolish slavery. They continued to be attacked, even by some abolitionists who considered their position too extreme. In 1836, Sarah published Epistle to the clergy of the southern states. In 1837, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women was published serially in a Massachusetts newspaper, The Spectator, and immediately reprinted in The Liberator, the newspaper published by radical abolitionist and women's rights leader William Lloyd Garrison. The letters were published in book form in 1838.

Sarah Grimke's role as both an able and vocal advocate of immediate emancipation and of women's rights were hugely controversial - not only in the South -but in the North also. It could easily be underestimated by people living at a different time in history how riled up New Englanders of the first half of the 19th Century could become over the issue of public speaking by women. These sisters were the first women agents of the abolitionist movement; and many believe that they were also the first women to speak in public to large crowds. Even more shocking, they were the first women to speak publicly to mixed audiences of both women and, horror, men. These southern bred women had to be intrepid as they publicly pronounced novel arguments to crowds, not all of whom were admirers.

In 1838, her sister Angelina married the leading abolitionist Theodore Weld. She retired to the background of the movement while being a wife and mother. Sarah Grimké too continued to work for the abolitionist movement in a less public role.

During the Civil War, Sarah wrote and lectured in support of President Abraham Lincoln.

[edit] See also

[edit] Books

  • Harrold, Stanley. (1996). The Abolitionists and the South, 1831-1861. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.
  • 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 0195106032

[edit] External links

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