Summary Of Sarah Grimke's Legal Disabilities Of Women

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Recommended: Slavery in America during the late 1700s

Most African Americans were enslaved in the 1800s in America, especially in the south. This time period was also a time when women were not receiving adequate rights compared to men. Abolitionists, those working to end slavery, began coming together to fight the evils of slavery. Fredrick Douglass, a runaway slave, formed a new life after escaping by giving talks, working to abolish slavery, and wrote a narrative of his whole life and got it published to help the movement to abolish slavery. In 1837, Sarah M. Grimke wrote, “Legal Disabilities of Women” which compared women's rights to those of a slave. Sarah Grimke compares white American married women to slaves because she is infuriated with some laws that take away certain rights from women …show more content…

Though single women were also not equal to men, women at least had the option to remain single in order to not be a mans “property.” One of the largest differences between a white women and slaves is the living conditions that they live under. Most white American married women lived in a house with their own family and received more than the bare necessities to stay alive. Slaves on the other hand only received “their monthly allowance of food, eight pounds of pork, or its equivalence in fish, and one bushel of corn meal” (239). The slaves also received only one pair of linen clothing each year and one blanket, no bed. Compared to the way white women lived the slaves condition of bare minimum resources to survive was brutal. A method used on slaves in order to keep them enslaved was to make sure that they do not get educated. Douglass shares a time when Mrs. Auld was teaching him the alphabet when he was the Auld’s slave and her husband found out and Douglass wrote, “Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it is unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read” (256). By keeping slaves uneducated, men were able to deem them as an inferior race and also prevent them from …show more content…

Grimke is obviously upset with the status of American white women and how they are being denied several rights that they rightfully deserve, so she is writing to shine light on this fact and work toward women equality. Sarah uses slaves as a comparison in order for her voice to be heard because more people will take note of this alarming comparison when seen in a headline and be more interested. Grimke was not only looking out for the women though, she was also an abolitionist writer and this comparison also shows how bad the life of a slave is, so her comparison is not only for women’s equality, but it is also for the equality of

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