Sarah Grimke was among many others who fought for the African Americans freedom in the United States. Sarah along with her sister Angelina both grew up in a home where their father owned slaves. Sarah was born on November 26, 1792 in Charleston, South Carolina. The sisters built an early dislike of slavery. In 1819 the sisters moved to Philadelphia where they joined the society of friends once known as the Friends of truth.
Angelina had a letter against slavery published in 1835 by William Lloyd Garrison and put in his newspaper the liberator. An Appeal to the Christian women of the south was pamphlet she also had published after the letter was. Sarah also sent in a pamphlet after her sister had done so, An epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States. After the publicity of these pamphlets and letter they were burned in public by South Carolina officials. Sarah and Angelina were told never to return home and if they were they would be arrested.
The sisters moved to New York after being forced out of Philadelphia. They became the first women to lecture for the Anti-Slavery Society. They were attacked by religious leaders who did not approve of women speaking in public. Torn by these actions of the religious leaders she wrote that men were attempting to “drive women from almost every sphere of moral action. The sisters refused to give up on what had already been started, so they became pioneers in the struggle for women rights.
The first Anti-Slavery Society in New York was established by Arthur and Lewis Tappan in 1831. In 1833 it became a national organization. William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Weld were among many of the main people in the organization. The organization got most of its support from religious leaders, like the Quakers, also for the black communities. Gradually other women followed Sarah and Angelina’s path and joined the Anti-Slavery Society. This society had organized meetings, the had times set fro signing petitions, the had anti slavery propaganda printed and distributed, they also employed people to go on lecture tours around the U.S. There were 250,000 members by the year 1840, they also had published 20 journals, and 2,000 chapters.
In 1838 Sarah had a booked published, Letters on the Equality of Sexes, which linked the rights of slaves to the rights of women.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were some of the most powerful women in the U.S. in the 1800s. These two women had many things in common. They were both abolitionist, speakers, and authors. Susan herself was the NAWSA’s first president, and Elizabeth’s life efforts helped her bring up the 19th Amendment. I stated that everybody had the right to vote. Both, of these women had or were apart of a company were Susan managed and Elizabeth wrote. They were a powerful team they actually printed an illegal paper called the “Revolution”. They actually met each other for the first time in 1851.
Beginning in the 1830s, white and black women in the North became active in trying to end slavery. These Women were inspired in many cases by the religious revivals sweeping the nation. While women in the movement at first focused their efforts upon emancipation, the intense criticsm that greeted their activities gradually pushed some of them toward an advocacy of women's rights as well. They discovered that they first had to defend their right to speak at all in a society in which women were expected to restrict their activities to a purely domestic sphere. Angelina and Sarah Grimke , left South Carolina because they were swept up in the religious current called the "Second Great Awakening" and felt that Philadelphia Quakers offered a surer form of saving their souls than the Protestant ministers of Charleston. During their influential speaking tour in 1837, about the anti-slavery movement, everyone wanted to hear them, so they broke the prohibitions against women speaking in public and, when clergymen opposed such public speaking by women, they launched the women's rights movement.
One of the main goals in the life of an elite southern woman was to be continually regarded as a lady. While some southern women privately disagreed with the popular social and political mindsets of their era, most of their opinions were not so strong that they felt the need to publicly advocate for change. This was mainly due to the fact that if a woman expressed her opinion publicly, she would be seen as unladylike, which would be a blow to her reputation, the cornerstone of how she defined herself. In the book Mothers of Invention, Drew Gilpin Faust gives the reader Lucy Wood as an example of an elite southern woman who had a negative opinion of the African slave trade. In a letter to her future husband, Lucy Wood expressed that she felt the African slave trade was “extremely revolting,” however, she was also quick to add “[but] I have no political opinion and have a peculiar dislike of all females who discuss such matters.” (10). This elite southern woman was apparently more concerned with her own ladylike reputation than standing up for ...
Up until and during the mid -1800’s, women were stereotyped and not given the same rights that men had. Women were not allowed to vote, speak publically, stand for office and had no influence in public affairs. They received poorer education than men did and there was not one church, except for the Quakers, that allowed women to have a say in church affairs. Women also did not have any legal rights and were not permitted to own property. Overall, people believed that a woman only belonged in the home and that the only rule she may ever obtain was over her children. However, during the pre- Civil war era, woman began to stand up for what they believed in and to change the way that people viewed society (Lerner, 1971). Two of the most famous pioneers in the women’s rights movement, as well as abolition, were two sisters from South Carolina: Sarah and Angelina Grimké.
In early nineteenth century there was the antislavery movement which was a failure. This people who were fighting for antislavery did not have a great support. They were nice gentle people who argued with an expression of moral disapproval but did not participate in an exert of activities. Organizations were formed to help support the freeing of slaves but these organizations did not have enough economical support to help with the thousands and thousands of slaves reproducing in America. They were able to free some slaves and tried returning some of them to their home lands in Africa but that was a failure because the amount of money need it to ship the Africans back to Africa was a high cost compared to the economical support that they had. There was even resistance from some Afr...
The antebellum American antislavery movement began in the 1820s and was sustained over 4 decades by organizations, publications, and small acts of resistance that challenged the legally protected and powerful institution of slavery and the more insidious enemy of black equality, racism. Abolitionists were always a radical minority even in the free states of the North, and the movement was never comprised of a single group of people with unified motivations, goals, and methods. Rather, the movement was fraught with ambiguity over who its leaders would be, how they would go about fighting the institution of slavery, and what the future would be like for black Americans.
But despite patriotic statement and vigorous public against colonization, there was a greater margin among black abolitionists and white who claimed to be abolitionists alike black people. In 1833 sixty reformers from eleven northern gathered in Philadelphia, creating an antislavery movements named American Antislavery Society (AASS). Its immediate goal was to end slavery without compensation for slaves oweners and rejected violence and the used of force. People involved were Quakers, Protestant clergymen, distinguished reformers, including three blacks by the names of Robert Purvis, Jame...
The experiences she had as a slave inspired her to become a prominent abolitionist for slave rights and women’s right. She felt that it was her God given duty to spread the cruelty, hypocrisy, and wrongness of discrimination against slaves and women. She claims that she “found Jesus” in 1827, which led her to change her name and be more religious. Her actual name was Isabella, but she chose to change it to Sojourner, she was to travel up and down the land showing people their sins and being a sign unto them ( “Sojourner Truth”). Sojourner had experienced loss that motivated her to speak to African American mothers who lost children to slavery. Sojourner’s children were all sold off to slavery. She suffered a lot from this because she knew that her children were going to be broken, a term used by white slave masters to strip a slave of th...
Women began standing up for more rights and realizing that they could be treated better. 1840 the World Anti-slavery Convention in London showed a great example of inferiority of women. Women were denied a seat at the convention because they were women. Women like Elizabeth C. Stanton and Lucretia C. Mott were enraged and inspired to launch the women’s rights movement. Elizabeth Stanton promoted women’s right to vote. “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to forment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
...s that they weren’t just slaves; they were women, sisters, wives, and daughters, just like the white women (DOC C). The women of this time period reached out to expand ideals by showing men that women were going to be involved in political affairs, and they had a right to do so.
Slave Rebellions were becoming common and one of the most famous was Nat Turner’s Rebellion. Led by slave preacher Nat Turner, who “became convinced that he had been chosen by God to lead his people to freedom”, a group of almost 80 slaves murdered over 60 white men, women, and children (Slave Rebellions). Maria Stewart was the first black women reported to have delivered a public speech (Coddon). She wrote a manuscript to a black audience that encouraged them not to “kill, burn, or destroy”, but rather “improve your talents… show forth your powers of mind (Coddon).” She wanted black people to know that both God and our founding documents affirmed them as equal with other men (Coddon). Being a black woman herself, she addressed other black women stating “ O, ye daughters of Africa, awake! Awake! Arise! No longer sleep nor slumber, but distinguish yourselves. Show forth the world that ye are endowed with noble and exalted faculties (Coddon).” Stewart believed that the world wasn 't going to change for the blacks, that the blacks had to change for the world, but by changes she meant show the world their worthiness and fight for their equality. Another woman fighting for equality was Sojourner Truth. Truth, formerly known as Isabella and former slave, was singer and public speaker against slavery (Coddon). SHe was the only black delegate at the Worcester, Massachusetts women’s rights convention in 1850 (Coddon).
That rights to anybody were the same that it didn’t matter on race or gender. While at the convention she had heard speeches given by local ministers and their agreement that men where on the higher on the society ladder then that of women. Giving arguments on four main categories: Superior intellect, how Christ would wanted equality he would of given the rights to the women before his death, and that of the first sin of Eve (Aint I A woman). All of the points the ministers made were why it was that women did not possess much power in a religious view. One minister had made a pointed out if Christ had intended to give women rights he would have done it before he had died. Sojourner having stated back, “He says women can’t have as much right as men, ‘cause Christ wasn’t a women! Whar did Christ come from?” (Aint I, pg. 2). That Christ had been born by a woman and had nothing to do with men at all. In a later speech she had stated,” the Bible says, sons and daughters ought to behave themselves before their mothers, but they don’t I’m watching…” (What time of night is it?). Many slave women had served as maid hands to young misters and misses of the plantation owners. They had served as second mothers to these children most of the time neglecting their own children. Much like Harriet and her grandmother, who had worked for the same women who now demanded
Still, her deviation from the confederate mindset did not cause her to necessarily promote total equality between men and women. As an abolitionist, Grimke suggested that women use their submissive positions in the household in order to influence heir husbands. Furthermore, Grimke’s tone and proposals differed as she targeted women from the North and the South. Grimke recognized that in the common Southern household, the woman would take the place of a homemaker and nurturer, qualities still primarily associated with women, and she used these stereotypes to the abolitionist advantage. In her four pronged “An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South”, Grimke states that the Southern Christian Woman has four duties in regards to abolition: to read, pray, speak and act. These four steps to abolition use the place of white women in the common household to circumvent around the little power that they had at this time. Grimke’s tone changes in her “Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States”, as she now refers to black women as not just slaves but “sisters” to whom white women owe humanization. In a
Between 1830 and the Civil War, slavery was a major political and religious issue, many influential people spoke out against slavery. For instance, abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, all wrote and spoke out against slavery in hopes of influencing others to abolish slavery. Frederick Douglass was born into slavery and wrote about his experiences. William Lloyd Garrison supported the immediate emancipation of slaves and started his own newspaper, the Liberator, to express his opinions. Writer, Harriet Beecher Stowe revealed the conditions of slavery to the world.
The 19th century was a time of great social change in the United States as reflected by the abolitionist movement and the women’s suffrage movement. Two very influential women leaders were Angelina Grimke and Sojourner Truth. Grimke was born a Southern, upper class white woman. She moved to the North as a young woman, grew involved in abolitionism and women’s rights, and became known for her writing, particularly “Letters to Catherine Beecher”. Sojourner Truth was born into slavery as Isabella Baumfree; she escaped to freedom, changed her name, and became an active speaker on behalf of both the abolition and women’s rights movements. Truth’s most famous speech is “Ain’t I a Woman?”. While both Grimke and Truth use a personal, conversational tone to communicate their ideas, Grimke relies primarily on logical arguments and Truth makes a more emotional appeal through the use of literary strategies and speech.