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Sarah Moore Grimké biography

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Abolitionist and feminist Sarah Moore Grimké and her sister Angelina were the first women to testify before a state legislature on the issue of blacks' rights.

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Synopsis

Sarah Moore Grimké was born on November 26, 1792, in Charleston, South Carolina. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Grimké became a Quaker. In 1837, she made an appearance at the Anti-Slavery Convention in New York, and published Letters on the Equality of the Sexes. She later became a teacher. During the Civil War, she supported the Union cause. Grimké died on December 23, 1873, in Hyde Park, Massachusetts.

Quotes

"All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."
– Sarah Moore Grimké

"Slavery was a millstone about my neck, and marred my comfort from the time I can remember myself."
– Sarah Moore Grimké

Early Years

Sarah Moore Grimké was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on November 26, 1792. Growing up on a southern plantation, both she and her older sister, Angelina, developed anti-slavery sentiments based on the injustices they observed. From an early age, they also resented the limitations imposed on women.

Such gender inequality was particularly evident to Sarah Grimké in the frivolous education afforded her. Her desire to study law as her brother did would never materialize, however, due to the restriction placed on women's education at the time.

Quaker

Frustrated by her surroundings, Sarah Grimké frequently found reprieve in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During one of her visits there, she met with members of the Quakers' Society of Friends. Finding their views on slavery and women's rights to be very much in line in with her own, Grimké decided to join them. In 1929, she moved to Philadelphia for good.

Nine years later, her sister, Angelina, joined her there, and the two became actively involved in the Society of Friends. Ironically, both sisters would be expelled from the group roughly a decade later, when Angelina chose to marry abolitionist Theodore Weld, who was not a Quaker.

Abolitinist and Feminist

The main catalyst for Sarah Grimké's activism in the abolitionist movement was her sister's letter to William Lloyd Garrison, which was published in The Liberator, his abolitionist newspaper. Because Grimké was the shier of the two, she tended to let Angelina take the lead. Still, it was both of them who, as a result of such attention, became the first women to testify in front of a state legislature on the issue of blacks' rights.

In 1837, Grimké and her sister made a prominent appearance at the Anti-Slavery Convention in New York. After the convention, they launched a public speaking tour in New England, during which they continued to express their abolitionist sentiment. Their audiences became increasingly diverse, and began to incorporate both men and women interested in the cause. Grimké and her sister gradually distinguished themselves from other abolitionist speakers by daring to debate with men, thereby doing away with former gender restrictions.

Unlike her more outspoken and radical sister, Grimké was not considered a dynamic public speaker. It was Grimké's written tracts, such as a series of letters published in 1837 in the New England Spectator and later collected under the title Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, that most powerfully voiced her feminist beliefs. The members of the Congressional General Association expressed their opposition to these writings in a "Pastoral Letter" that denounced women who strayed outside of societal gender roles.

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