Angelina Grimké

“The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians.” —Angelina Grimké

Born this day in 1805: Angelina Grimké (1805–1879), abolitionist and women’s rights advocate

Angelina Grimké and her sister, Sarah Grimké, were born into a prominent slave-holding family in South Carolina. As young women, both left the south to speak out against slavery. Their antislavery activism aroused harsh criticism. Much of that criticism was leveled at them because they were women daring to speak in public—and to mixed audiences.

“We have given great offense on account of our womanhood, which seems to be as objectionable as our abolitionism. I believe it is woman’s right to have a voice in all the laws and regulations by which she is governed.”

Soon they were crusading for women’s rights as well. In 1838 Angelina spoke before the Massachusetts state legislature, making an appeal for both abolition and for women’s rights. She was the first woman to address a U.S. legislature.

Angelina most famously authored the pamphlet “An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South.” In this pamphlet she appealed to those who claimed the Bible justified slavery and used the Bible to argue convincingly that it did not. She also co-authored, with her husband, Theodore Weld, and Sarah, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. The work was widely considered the most accurate description of slavery and was used as a resource by Harriet Beecher Stowe when writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

In 1868 Grimké learned that her brother Henry had fathered two children of an enslaved woman. Both sisters acknowledged their nephews and sponsored their education. 

After the Civil War, Grimké concentrated on the women’s movement. She, as well as her husband and her sister, played a leading role in the Massachusetts Women’s Suffrage Association. In 1870, she joined her sister and more than 40 other women in an illegal protest vote.

Angelina Grimké was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1998.

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Lydia Maria Child

“The subject I have chosen admits of no encomiums on my country; but as I generally make it an object to supply what is most needed, this circumstance is unimportant; the market is so glutted with flattery, that a little truth may be acceptable, were it only for its rarity.” 

—Lydia Maria Child, preface to An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833)

 Born this day in 1802: Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880), writer and speaker who advocated for the rights of African Americans, Native Americans, and women; one of the first women to make a living from writing

Lydia Maria Child was born Lydia Maria Francis in Medford, Massachusetts. A teacher, novelist, and publisher of a children’s magazine, Child became a tireless champion of African Americans, Native Americans, and women. She was one of the first women in the country to make a living from writing, including writing a popular book on domestic economy and novels for children. This living was often threatened because of the bold stances she took against slavery, the unequal treatment of African Americans, and the gross injustices perpetrated on Native Americans. Unlike many abolitionists, she sought equal treatment of whites and blacks in American society. Her influential work An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) laid out the injustices and horrors of slavery and protested the unequal educational and employment opportunities for African Americans. The outspoken work prompted many to join the abolitionist movement. But many others stopped buying her books, publishers stopped accepting her work, and she was fired as editor of a children’s magazine. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier noted that “her praises were suddenly silenced. No woman in this country…sacrificed so much for principles as Mrs. Child.” She was very influential in her day, but what is she most remembered for today? Writing the words to “Over the River and Through the Woods.” Let’s change that, femiloguers!

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Abby Foster

“All the great family of mankind are bound up in one bundle. When we aim a blow at our neighbor’s rights our own are by the same blow destroyed. Can we look upon the wrongs of millions—can we see their flow of tears and grief and blood, and not feel our hearts drawn out in sympathy?” 

—Abby Foster

Born this day in 1810: Abigail Kelley Foster (1810–1887), radical abolitionist and women’s rights leader who shook up the status quo

Foster was born Abigail Kelley in Pelham, Massachusetts. She was raised a Quaker and educated in Quaker schools. She also began teaching in a Quaker school, but gave up her teaching career in 1839 to lecture full-time for the abolitionist cause. Foster was a dynamic speaker and radical in her views, which included criticism of the church, the government, and even the Constitution. Her extreme views—and especially the fact that she would address mixed audiences—often incited violence. Nevertheless, she kept up an exhaustive speaking schedule, eventually including other causes into her talks, such temperance, suffrage, dress reform, and financial independence for women.

In 1845 she married a fellow abolitionist, Stephen Symonds Foster. A marriage of equals, they took turns lecturing and tending to their farm and their children. Sometimes they lectured together. On several occasions they refused to pay taxes on the farm as protest against Foster’s lack of vote. Whenever the farm was seized and auctioned off, it would be purchased by supporters and returned to them.

Foster’s prominent position in the abolition movement led to some schisms, some involving the role of women in the movement and others involving her criticism of the church’s attitude toward slavery. Like many woman abolitionists, the hostility she met when trying to advocate for rights for African Americans led her to become increasingly involved in the women’s movement. She was a role model for future feminist leaders, including Lucy Stone, who said of her:

Mrs. Foster, for more than thirty years, stood in the thick of the fight for the slaves, and, at the same time, she hewed out the path over which women are now walking toward their equal political rights.

 —Lucy Stone 

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Caroline Severance

Born this day in 1820: Caroline Seymour Severance (1820–1914), social reformer, suffragist, women’s club pioneer

Caroline Severance was born Caroline Seymour in Canandaigua, New York. She was educated at various female seminaries and taught briefly at a boarding school for girls. In 1840 she married Theodoric Cordenio Severance. The couple moved to Cleveland and had five children.

The influence of her reform-minded husband and his family kick-started Severance on a career of reform work lasting  seven decades. Severance was at the center of many reforms, including abolitionism, women’s rights, temperance, dietary reform, and religious liberalism. Literary figures were also welcomed in the Severance home. Severance was active in women’s rights conventions and was president of the first convention of the Ohio Women’s Rights Association (1853).

She was deeply impressed by the traveling lecturers from New England, so when her husband was offered a job in Boston, the family jumped at the chance to relocate. Severance surrounded herself with the city’s leading literary figures and reformists. She became a lecturer on behalf of the mounting abolition movement and was a close friend of William Lloyd Garrison.

Severance was involved in a wide range of reform activities. In 1862 she joined the board of directors of the New England Hospital for Women  and Children. In 1867 she cofounded the American Equal Rights Association with Susan B. Anthony, and the following year she helped found the Free Religious Association. She also founded that year what one of the earliest women’s club in the nation, the New England Women’s Club. In 1869 she helped found the American Woman Suffrage Association.

In 1875 Severance and her husband moved to California, where she continued her tireless reform efforts. She organized women’s clubs and presided over the Los Angeles County Woman Suffrage League for several years, giving it a much-needed shot in the arm. She was a driving force in California’s kindergarten movement and the establishment of juvenile courts. She promoted Christian socialism, Progressivism, and anti-imperialism. She was also a pacifist. In 1911, after California passage state suffrage for women, Severance, at age 91, became the first woman in California to register to vote.

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Lucretia Mott

“I am no advocate of passivity.” —Lucretia Mott

Born this day in 1793: Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793–1880), pioneering social reformer and founder of the U.S. women’s movement

Mott was born Lucretia Coffin in Nantucket, Massachusetts, to a Quaker family. Her father was a whaler and her mother was a shopkeeper. Their example and Quaker teachings gave Mott a firm foundation in the concept of equality between the sexes. While teaching at a Quaker school in New York State, Mott discovered, however, that Quakers preached better than they practiced: as a woman teacher, her salary was half that of the men’s.

In 1811 she married fellow teacher James Mott. The couple moved to Philadelphia and had six children.

Mott became a social reformer of the first order and radical in the depths of her reform. She was an abolitionist and advocated for equality between the races, equality between the sexes, Native American rights, religious liberty, religious tolerance, and pacifism. A woman of strong, steadfast moral convictions, Mott was a moving and effective speaker. In 1821 she was ordained a Quaker minister.  She also toured and lectured on the anti-slavery cause and, increasingly, on the cause of women. Her outspokenness and the fact that she lectured to audiences comprising both men and women (“promiscuous” audiences) often aroused anger. More than once she was threatened with mob violence.

Like many early feminists, the sexism she faced while participating—or trying to—in the abolition movement led her to believe in the equal urgency of women’s liberation.  In 1840 she and the other women delegates were denied seats at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London. It was there, screened behind a curtain in a remote balcony, that she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The two women then and there decided to launch a full-scale women’s movement in the United States. The movement was formally launched in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. The Seneca Falls Convention presented the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence. Stanton, who drafted it, included suffrage for women, a radical notion even among feminists.  Mott did not initially support inclusion of suffrage because, as a Quaker, she was boycotting the vote as a pressure tactic against slavery. She later relented and subsequently opposed the fourteenth amendment because it limited suffrage to males. She believed white or black, man or woman, everyone had the same inherent right to vote, and advocated suffrage for all.

Mott remained a prominent figure in the women’s movement, attending conventions, lecturing, and writing on such topics as legal, political, and social inequality, inequality in women’s education and employment, and women’s subordination, legal and otherwise, in marriage. She, along with her husband (who wholly supported and aided her efforts) continued also in her opposition to slavery and aided fugitives on the Underground Railroad. She remained a pacifist, even as civil war loomed, advocating instead boycotts of products made by slave labor. In 1866 she became the first president of the newly formed American Equal Rights Association, which advocated equal rights and suffrage for all Americans, regardless of “race, color, or sex.”

In 1923, at the 75^th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, Alice Paul introduced the Equal Rights Amendment, which she named the Lucretia Mott Amendment in honor of this most visionary of founding feminists. Mott was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1983.

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Josephine Griffing

Born this day in 1814: Josephine Griffing (1814–1872), abolitionist who also supported equal rights for women and who assisted the newly emancipated

Griffing was born Josephine Sophie White in Hebron, Connecticut. She married Charles Stockman Spooner Griffing in 1836. The couple moved to Ohio, where they were both active in the abolition movement. They made their home a station on the Underground Railroad.

Griffing was a member as well as a paid agent of the Western Anti-Slavery Society. She gave speeches on the socieity’s behalf throughout the region and wrote articles for its newsletter. During the Civil War she was also active in the Women’s National Loyal League, a militant feminist group that lobbied the government for full emancipation.

Griffing was active in the women’s rights movement. She was a founding member of the Ohio Women’s Rights Association and was elected its president in 1853. She was also a founder, in 1866, of the American Equal Rights Association and served as its first vice president.  She was president and founder of the District of Columbia’s woman suffrage association in 1867. In 1869 she helped found the National Woman Suffrage Association and served as its corresponding secretary.

Griffing is most remembered, however, for work she did following the Civil War to aid the newly emancipated. She strongly believed that it was the nation’s duty, both in the public and private spheres, to help former slaves make a successful transition into lives of freedom.

Griffing moved to Washington, D.C., where many of the newly freed migrated to after the war. She began working for D.C.’ s national Freedman’s Relief Association. She oversaw the establishment of settlement programs and other relief. She also used her own network of friends to personally help many newly emancipated African Americans find jobs in the North. She was also influential in the creation of the Freedman’s Bureau. After the bureau’s demise, she continued to find other ways to assist the newly emancipated, including caring for many of the most needy, such as the elderly, in her home.

Below is an excerpt from an editorial she wrote for Harper’s Weekly, arguing for the necessity of the Freedman’s Bureau:

Now that the policy of the Government is maturely settled, it is clear that one of the chief questions of the immediate future will be the care of the freedmen. In ordinary times, when emancipation is enforced by law, as in the case of the British colonies, and especially in Jamaica, the rage and pride of the planters prevent a fair trial of the experiment. They refuse to treat honorably as paid laborers those whom they have been used to drive as cattle, and the inevitable consequence is that the great plantations fall into ruin.…The condition of our emancipated slaves is such as to require the most faithful and intelligent care. The operation of the act is to attract them to our lines. They come in groups of utterly destitute men, women, and children. The most unfortunate of human beings, they yet do not find corresponding sympathy. Even the Government which has freed them, and which invites them to enlist as soldiers, does not treat them honorably, and pays them not the wages of the white soldiers, with whom they bravely fight and nobly fall, but only the ten dollars a month allowed by the law for the general employment of contrabands. Homeless, almost houseless, utterly destitute and dependent, this rapidly-increasing class of our population demand a peculiar care. It is idle to say that no particular class of persons can be provided for, but they must all take their chance, because we recognize that common-sense is the basis of statesmanship when we establish a Bureau of Indian Affairs and a Department of Agriculture. Indians and farmers are the two classes directly interested; but does any body quarrel with the bureaus for that reason?

 The sagacity of the President will undoubtedly lead him to make some proposition to Congress for the establishment of a Freedman’s Bureau, charged with the care of this exceptional class.

—“A New Bureau,” Harper’s Weekly, December 26, 1863, page 818

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Sarah Moore Grimké

 “I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. 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.”

Born this day in 1792: Sarah Moore Grimké (1792–1873), abolitionist and woman’s rights advocate

Sarah Grimké and her younger sister, Angelina, were born into a wealthy slave-holding family in South Carolina. Sarah abhorred slavery, despite the privileged lifestyle if afforded her. “Slavery,” she wrote, “was a millstone around my neck, and marred my comforts from the time I can remember myself.” Another millstone around her neck was the South’s attitude toward educating girls. Sarah longed to study law like her brother, but had to make do with studying on her own the books in her father’s library (he was a judge).

In 1821 Sarah left the South for good, and her sister Angelina followed her in 1829. Both joined the abolition movement. They were the first women to join the American Anti-Slavery Society.  The Grimké sisters aroused harsh criticism by not only speaking out against slavery, but by speaking out at all because they were women. Soon they were crusading for women’s rights as well. 

In 1836 Sarah published the An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States, in which she refuted the Biblical justifications for slavery. In 1838 she published Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and The Condition of Woman. It is the first major written work arguing for equality of the sexes. In it she decries the role assigned to women; she does not dismiss the importance of motherhood or the household arts, but the instead argues against the oppression of women’s intellect and opportunity in order to cultivate them into the playthings and servants of men. She even argued for equal pay for equal work, a battle still being fought today.

I allude to the disproportionate value set on the time and labor of men and of women.…As for example, in tailoring, a man has twice, or three times as much for making a waistcoast [sic] or pantaloons as a woman, although the work done by each may be equally good. In those employments which are peculiar to women, their time is estimated at only half the value of that of men. A woman who goes out to wash, works as hard in proportion as a wood sawyer, or a coal heaver, but she is not generally able to make more than half as much by a day’s work.

The following year she co-authored, with Angelina and Angelina’s husband, Theodore Weld, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. The work proved to be a great resource for Harriet Beecher Stowe when writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book included discussion of the sexual exploitation of women slaves by white men (a topic Sarah also addressed in Letters on the Equality of the Sexes). Their concern was made manifest in 1868 when they discovered the existence of two nephews, Archibald and Francis, children of their brother Henry and an enslaved woman. Both sisters acknowledged their nephews and sponsored their education. Francis Grimké graduated from Princeton Theological School. Archibald Grimké graduated from Harvard Law School and would go on to become both a lawyer and a leader of the NAACP.

In her later years Sarah remained active in the suffrage movement. In 1870 both she and her sister voted illegally in a local election.

Sarah Grimké was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1998.

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Charlotte Forten Grimké

Born this day in 1873:  Charlotte Forten Grimké (1873–1914), abolitionist, civil rights activist, women’s rights activist, educator of freed blacks, journalist, and diarist

Charlotte Forten, a native of Pennsylvania, was born a free black to a wealthy African American family at the forefront of the abolition movement. She was educated in Salem, Massachusetts, and later became a teacher herself. She was the first African American teacher to teach white students.

Forten was an active abolitionist, raising money for the cause and contributing to anti-slavery publications such as The Liberator. With the arrival of the Civil War, she turned her attention to educating the newly emancipated. A sosphisticated and cultured woman herself, she joined an educational experiment to demonstrate to Northerners that all that stood between African Americans and achievements equal to that of whites was opportunity and education. The Port Royal Experiment, as it was called, prepared former slaves for the economic and social independence they would need following the war.

Former slaves prepare cotton for ginning in Port Royal.
Freed men and women earned wages and received and education. 

In 1862 she headed to Port Royal, South Carolina, teaching former slaves who fled their plantations upon the arrival of Union forces. She recounted her experiences, “Life on the Sea Islands,” in the Atlantic Monthly in 1864. She was a faithful diarist and left posterity a detailed account of the life she lead. Her diaries reveal the problematic intersections of race and class as well as chronicle of a society’s struggle against racism and sexism.

She left South Carolina after contracting smallpox. In 1878 she married Francis J. Grimké, an activist from another prominent abolitionist family. She continued working with freedmen and women and advocating for equality of the races. She also became active in the women’s rights movement.

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