This was American abolition’s distinct contribution to women’s rights. Mary Wollstonecraft, working within the terms of republican thought, was too encumbered by a negative imagery of womankind to come close to the idea that the essence of woman—as she existed in the present, not in some better future—was identical to the essence of man. The problem with making reason the founding principle of equality was that women were always found to be so deficient in it. But moral equality existed here and now. Every person was a moral being: slaves, yes, and women, too. It was only power, pure and simple, that prevented them from exercising their full humanity. It was a religious argument, although it had clear ramifications in a democratic society with a highly developed political culture. “This regulation of duty by the mere circumstance of sex, rather than by the fundamental principle of moral being, has led to all that multifarious train of evils flowing out of the anti-Christian doctrine of masculine and feminine virtues,” Angelina avowed in her riposte to Catharine Beecher’s attack on the behavior of FASS women in general and the Grimkés in particular. Female abolitionists were guilty of deserting their duties, Beecher maintained, and of abnegating the domestic virtues that gave women true power. “Woman is to win everything by peace and love; by making herself respected, esteemed, and loved.… But this is all to be accomplished in the domestic and social circle,” she scolded.28
Her platitudes give a sense of what abolitionist women were up against: smug insinuation and pious condemnation, as if the lifelong church members, revered matrons, and Quaker ladies who constituted the FASS were not respected, esteemed, and loved. But against such adversaries, Angelina’s recourse to God’s call to moral action irrespective of sex was a stalwart defense. The sisters’ challenge to the unwritten rule barring women from public speaking galvanized antislavery troops, especially women.
In New England, “the whole land seem[ed] roused to discussion on the province of woman, & I am glad of it,” Angelina rejoiced to a woman friend. “Sister Sarah does preach up woman’s rights most nobly & fearlessly, & we find that many of our New England sisters are ready to receive these strange doctrines, feeling as they do, that our whole sex needs an emancipation from the thraldom of public opinion.” The “strange doctrines” were their reflections on the moral equality of the sexes, braided through disquisitions on the sin of enslaving other human beings.29
The association of women’s rights with the preeminent issue of the day pushed it into proslavery discourse as well. Women’s rights reformers would turn into Exhibit A for the slaveholders’ case that abolition was an insult to the God-given order of master governing slave, husband governing wife. Up to the Civil War, the South held on to the link between abolition and women’s rights; politically, it was a peerless device to advertise abolitionism’s intent to destroy everyone’s family along with the slave owner’s brood: the white women and children and the black people under his benevolent care and protection. “Ideas about the natural inequality of women contributed not a little to the ideological and political cohesion of the proslavery cause,” points out Stephanie McCurry.30
In the North, the radical opposition to slavery, coupled with the challenge to gender rules, provoked the most powerful clerical body in New England to issue a condemnation of the Grimkés that ministers were to read at Sunday services. The “Pastoral Letter” was so assured and clear in its point-by-point prescriptions for correct womanhood that it amounts to an antifeminist manifesto, the nation’s first. The ministers reminded congregants that women were by nature weak and dependent on men, like vines winding their tendrils around trees. “The power of woman is her dependence, flowing from her consciousness of that weakness which God has given her for her protection.” When a woman presumed to speak about matters outside the domestic sphere (the Grimkés’ identities were thinly veiled), she usurped the place of man and “her character becomes unnatural”: withered, sterile, falling “in shame and dishonor into the dust.”31 Such was the punitive portrayal with which the devout Grimkés contended.
In the crunch, abolitionist brothers proved to be disappointing allies. Holding much in common, they still worked with a different calculus of the importance of women’s demands. We can see the fault lines developing in letters between the Grimkés, who were on the road speaking, and Theodore Dwight Weld, a leader in the Seventy. Weld was quietly in love with Angelina. Two years older than her, he was a veteran organizer and a superb orator, one of the rebels dismissed from Lane Seminary in Cincinnati in 1834 because they refused to temper their abolitionist activity. Months on the road agitating for the AASS, facing down violent crowds in the process, had steeled his commitment. A man among men, he had little experience—perhaps none—of heterosexual love; and like any of his generation, he had no experience until then working with women as collaborators in public affairs.32 There was a considerable emotional and intellectual leap from his all-male world to the association he developed with the Grimkés, and Angelina in particular.
Weld agreed with them in principle but thought the sisters headstrong and overly preoccupied with an issue that was extraneous to the cause. Women had every right to speak, yes, but there were ways to make their actions more palatable. Positioning himself as a kindly older brother who knew best—“my dear sisters,” he called them—Weld struggled to contain his disapproval as the Grimkés shocked New England. In thick letters, pages and pages penned in furious disputation, he urged them to stick to their appointed topic—slavery—and stay away from the rights of women. At first he was courteous and jocular, but as the opposition mounted, he scolded, lectured, and harangued, sometimes firing off two long letters a day. Their strategy should be tactful, change-by-example, he told them. Let intelligent women act with dignity and modesty, and “men begin to be converted.” In response, Angelina, usually lachrymose and conflicted, for once turned tart. “What is the matter with thee,” she fired back. The problem was unavoidable, she flatly stated. “How can we expect to be able to hold meetings much longer when people are so diligently taught to despise us for thus stepping out of the sphere of woman?”33
In a conflict that called not for men’s abstract principles but their forthright solidarity, the sisters’ disappointment with the comrades crept in. Weld at least tried to work out some basis for agreement, but other men jumped ship. The sisters came to believe that their interest in women cut too close to the private interests of colleagues: “It will touch every man’s interests at home,” reflected Angelina, “in the tenderest relation of life.” Then “WHO will stand by woman in the great struggle?” she wondered.34
They turned to other women. Shifting coteries backed them, protecting them from social ostracism. Boston abolitionist women stepped in: Anne Weston came out to Groton to fortify them, and the president of the Boston FASS, Mary Parker, wrote to assure them that they would stand by them, even “if every body else forsook us,” Angelina informed Weld with a hint of reproach.35 The crusade to free the slaves intensified the meaning of the bonds of womanhood: They spoke of feeling different when women met together, of something new happening. Of the convention of the ladies’ societies in New York, Angelina rejoiced that the gathering “very soon broke down all stiffness & reserve, threw open our hearts to each other’s view, and produced a degree of confidence in ourselves & each other which was very essential & delightful.” The resolutions they passed would “frighten the weak and startle the slumbering,” she crowed to a friend.36 It was not the sentimental ties of domesticity and benevolent work she celebrated, but their involvement in a great cause. That women alone could work together to vindicate the sex was something that Mary Wollstonecraft had not imagined.
The clash with New England ministers, coupled with male co-workers’ disapproval, provoked Sarah Grimké to work out an impassioned rebuttal. Her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, published first in The Liberator and then as a pamphlet in 1838, was an unapologetically defiant book. Had she read Mary Wollstonecraft? Perhaps not: The Vindication’s associ
ation with the godless French Revolution might well have repelled her. On the other hand, it would have been available. Grimké’s fellow Quaker Lucretia Mott, also a member of the PFASS, kept it on her parlor table, a token of sympathy for an unfashionable topic. The book bobbed around working-class democratic-radical circles, too, in the 1830s: We have a sighting of a striking worker in a New England mill town who climbed on top of a pump to give “a flaming Mary Wollstonecroft speech” (so the local paper reported).37 But regardless of whether Sarah Grimké had read it or not, the book’s very existence may have encouraged her. Perhaps it seemed, like other important feminist books since (Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, for instance), more hospitable with its cover closed, evoking some undefined mental place where the keywords of the title—Woman—Rights—Vindication—signaled the need for change without having to get there by trudging through the text.
The Letters make no reference to Wollstonecraft, though. They plunge off in a different direction, to elaborate on women’s absolute moral equality. The prose leaps with the excitement of novelty and invention. “Men and women were CREATED EQUAL,” Sarah proclaimed, the capital letters announcing unassailable truth. “They are both moral and accountable beings, and whatever is right for a man to do, is right for a woman.” And again, lest readers missed the point: “WHATSOEVER IT IS MORALLY RIGHT FOR A MAN TO DO, IT IS MORALLY RIGHT FOR A WOMAN TO DO.”38
The contention threw her up against not only the Massachusetts clergy, formidable enough, but also more fearsome antagonists: Saint Paul, centuries of scriptural interpretation, domestic ideology, and the institution of marriage. She faced them all squarely. No woman ever wrote like this; certainly not Wollstonecraft, whose ever-present sense of objections glowering at her from the edges of the page kept her proclaiming from the high ground of dispassionate reason. Grimké wrote aggressively, momentarily blessed by that obliviousness to danger on which startling courage depends. The Letters glow.
The light comes from several sources. First, Grimké lined herself up squarely with her subject as “we”—“we” women—as Mary Wollstonecraft would not. In the shift, the significance of the empathetic female voice in feminism becomes evident: Grimké liked women and wrote with them as well as to them and about them. It took time; in the first letters she pronounced from on high. But soon the sentences enveloped the writer in a “we” at once injured and noble: “the majesty of our immortal nature,” “the wrong we suffer.” And, on the other side of the equation, she identified the problem as “them,” that is, men: Even among the abolitionist brethren she discerned a collective gender disposition. “Whether our brothers have defrauded us intentionally, or unintentionally the wrong we suffer is equally the same.”39
Second, she located the damage not in women’s failures, but in men’s power. She believed that women had all the internal resources to obey God’s will. But men impeded them; they “usurped”—the word is singular to her—a power that was rightfully God’s to try to make themselves masters of women’s consciences. In the abolitionist manner, she described that power as physical coercion of another, just as the master physically overpowered the slave. Her most powerful metaphors were of sexual inequality as bodily submission. Climactically, she declared, “I ask no favors for my sex,” and she insisted, “All I ask of 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.”40
Third, abolition taught her how to unpeel the accretions of the status quo so that what people considered natural in human relations could be held up to scrutiny. “Mastery” linked slavery to women’s subjection. Here, Grimké drew on the idea of the “slave power,” gaining credence in the 1830s, which pictured slave owners as conscious practitioners and defenders of a system that benefited them rather than, in the older manner, as reluctant heirs to a difficult situation.
At the time, though, Grimké’s Bible readings were probably more influential than those political ideas for which we value her today. This was an age when the Bible, not anatomy, biochemistry, or genetics, was the final word on why women were different from men and why that difference made them subordinate. Her wit and fluency are striking, especially because she had the haphazard education of a Southern lady, consisting of a short spell at a Charleston female academy and secondhand lessons she culled from her brother’s tutor. Yet she shows a mind playful and learned as she sidles around pitfalls, clambers over walls, and strikes out on obscure byways, working her way through exacting readings of the Bible to reach ingenious conclusions. There was, for instance, the old problem of the Fall. Was not Eve, after all, the instrument of mankind’s fall from grace, a willful creature who needed Adam to keep her in check? Yes, but Adam was every bit as much a weak character, maybe more so, since Eve was tricked by Satan, while Adam went along of his own free will. How to get around Paul, who ordered women to keep silent in churches? It was only a tip to leaders of the early churches, she suggested, because they contended with women who were so excited to be liberated from strict Jewish ritual that they interrupted services too often with questions.41
The Grimké controversy and the spread of women’s rights thought fueled anti-abolitionist fires. Sexual imagery conflated the two causes: It was “old maids” and “nigger-lovers” who made up the female societies. Rhetorical violence in newspapers and pamphlets fed mob violence—indeed, a mob murdered the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois, in 1837. Women were not exempt. In 1835 in Boston, a crowd of several thousand threatened members of the BFASS who were thought to be hiding a visiting British abolitionist in their meeting rooms. The mayor had to intervene and escort the women out of the building past enraged onlookers roaring threats and insults. Afterward, Maria Weston Chapman, a leading member and daughter of the prominent and wealthy Weston family, could not walk in the streets of her own city without passersby and shop clerks hurling abuse at her. The Boston women noted acidly the double standard that divided acceptable female behavior from activity that was reviled. They were all involved in several reform causes, they observed, and when they staged a benefit for the blind at Faneuil Hall, “we basked in the sunshine of popular favor.” Female altruism on behalf of the blind was one thing: “No one said then, ‘women had better stay home.’ ” Doing the same thing on behalf of the slaves, though, was another matter, bringing threats bordering on lethal.42
In Philadelphia in 1838, violence again broke out. There, in a private ceremony, Angelina Grimké married Theodore Weld before a racially mixed group of guests. Newspapers denounced the gathering and drummed up popular rage, abetted by city authorities and gentlemen of standing. Three days later, the second national convention of the female societies met in downtown Philadelphia. A mob went after them, smashing windows at Pennsylvania Hall, where they were meeting, and screaming threats. Finally, the women retreated, linking arms—white and black women paired, it was said, the better to protect the latter—before a drunken, enraged crowd that then proceeded to burn down the building.43
Violence is not usually seen as a factor in American feminist politics but at this early moment it had a chilling effect. The Philadelphia riot marked a rupture, driving a generation back into private life and political semi-retirement. African-American women almost disappeared from the female societies. The Colored American, the country’s one black newspaper, sided with critics of the Grimkés and cautioned black women not to stray from their sphere, criticizing Sarah Grimké’s Letters and calling up the bugaboo of Fanny Wright. The editor Samuel Cornish took the occasion to accuse women of letting down the race: “Colored females, from education, are more especially deficient in fulfilling their appropriate duties, and in redeeming the character and carrying forward the interests of their oppressed and injured people. As wives, as mothers and as daughters, they are too inert, and not sufficiently self-sacrificing.” Conscientious black mothers were meant to exert their influence at home, building up their families and salving the wounds
that prejudice inflicted on their men.44
The convergence of the Grimké controversy, the Pastoral Letter, and violence in Philadelphia proved an unsupportable burden for the female societies. Garrison defended the sisters—and women’s participation—adamantly. But Garrison was an uncompromising leader who admitted no half measures, and his “come-outer” defiance of the established churches put off AASS members not inclined to “ultraist” views. Some resisted the Garrisonian defense because they themselves believed that women’s place was in the home. Others had sympathy but thought that women’s rights discredited the cause with moderates who needed to be won over if abolitionism was to make political headway.
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