Grimke Sisters

The Grimke Sisters, Sarah Grimke (1792 - 1873) and Angelina Grimke Weld (1805 - 1879), were 19th Century Quakers, educators and writers who were early advocates of abolitionism and women's rights.

Related Topics:
Sarah Grimke - Angelina Grimke Weld - Abolitionism

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Sarah and Angelina Grimke, originally from South Carolina, traveled throughout the North states, lecturing about their first-hand experiences with slavery on their family plantation. Among the first women to act publicly in social reform movements, they received abuse and ridicule for their abolitionist activity. They both realized that women would have to create a safe space in the public arena to be effective abolitionists and reformers. And so the sisters also became early activists in the women's rights movement.

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Their father, a strong advocate of slavery and of the subordination of women, was chief judge of the Supreme Court of South Carolina and a wealthy planter with hundreds of slaves. He fathered at least 14 children. Sarah was the sixth child and Angelina was the youngest. Sarah Grimke was an abolitionist from an early age. She stated that after she saw a slave being whipped at age five, she tried to board a steamer to a place where there was no slavery. Later in violation of the law in many Southern states, she taught her personal attendant to read.

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Sarah wanted to become an attorney and follow in her father's footsteps. She studied constantly until her parents learned she intended to go to college with her brother - then they forbid her to study her brother's books or any language. Her father supposedly remarked that if she ...had not been a woman she would have made the greatest jurist in the land." After her studies were ended, Sarah begged her parents to allow her to become Angelina's godmother and she became part mother and part sister to her much younger sibling.

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At age 26, Sarah took her father to Philadelphia for medical care. While there, she became acquainted with the Quaker/Society of Friends movement. After he died, she returned to Charleston, South Carolina in 1818. Three years later she moved back to Philadelphia to be with her Quaker friends. Sarah visited Charleston for the final time in 1827 when she converted Angelina to the Quaker faith. Angelina joined her in the north in 1829.

Related Topics:
Philadelphia - Quaker - Charleston, South Carolina

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In 1838, Angelina married the feminist and abolitionist Theodore Weld. Initially both Weld's planned for Angelina to remain active in the abolitionist movement. But the time demands of running a home and being a wife and mother, forced Angelina to retire from public life. Sarah moved in with her sister and also retired from public life. Although the sisters no longer spoke publicly, they remained privately active as both abolitionists and feminists. In 1839 the sisters edited "American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses", a collection of newspaper stories from southern papers written by southern newspaper editors. Angelina bore three children, in 1839, 1841, and 1844. Thereafter, she suffered from a disorder of the reproductive tract. Until 1844, Theodore was often away from home, either on the lecture circuit or in Washington. After that, financial pressures forced him to take up a more lucrative profession. For a time they lived on a farm and operated a boarding school. Many abolitionists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, sent their children to the school. Eventually, it grew to become a cooperative community, Raritan Bay Union.

Related Topics:
Theodore Weld - Elizabeth Cady Stanton - Raritan Bay Union

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After the war, the sisters took in two mulatto children, their nephews, who both used the Grimke name. Francis J. Grimke was a Presbyterian minister who graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and Princeton Theological Seminary. In December 1878, he married Charlotte Forten Grimke, a noted educator and author, had one daughter, Theodora Cornelia, who died as an infant. The daughter of one, Angelina Weld Grimke, (named after her aunt) became a noted poet. When Sarah was nearly 80, to test the fifteenth amendment, the sisters attempted to vote. These two remarkable, dynamic feminists led rich and full lives.

Related Topics:
Mulatto - Charlotte Forten Grimke - Angelina Weld Grimke

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