Essay On Angelina Grimke Weld

Angelina Emily Grimké Weld was an American political activist, women's rights advocate, supporter of the women's suffrage movement, and besides her sister, Sarah Moore Grimké, the only known white Southern woman to be a part of the abolition movement. While she was raised a Southerner, she spent her entire adult life living in the North. The time of her greatest fame was between 1836, when a letter she sent to William Lloyd Garrison was published in his anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, and May 1838, when she gave a courageous and brilliant speech to abolitionists gathered in Philadelphia, with a hostile crowd throwing stones and shouting outside the hall. The essays and speeches she produced in that two-year period were incisive arguments

to end slavery and to advance women's rights.
Drawing her views from natural rights theory, the Constitution, Christian beliefs in the Bible, and her own experience of slavery and racism in the South, Grimké argued for the injustice of denying freedom to any man or woman. She was particularly eloquent on the problem of racial prejudice. When challenged for speaking in public to mixed audiences of men and women in 1837, she and her sister Sarah Moore Grimké fiercely defended women's right to make speeches and participate in political action.
In May 1838, Grimké married Theodore Weld, a prominent abolitionist. They lived in New Jersey with her sister Sarah Moore Grimké, and raised three children. They earned a living by running two schools, the latter located in the Raritan Bay Union utopian community. After the Civil War ended, the Grimké–Weld household moved to Hyde Park, Massachusetts, where they spent their last years. Angelina and Sarah were active in the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association in the 1870s.
Family background
Grimké was born in Charleston, South Carolina to John Faucheraud Grimké and Mary Smith, both from wealthy planter families. Her father was an Anglican lawyer, planter, politician, and judge, a Revolutionary War veteran and distinguished member of Charleston society. Her mother Mary was a descendant of Landgrave Thomas Smith and his wife, another elite Charleston family. They were major slaveholders. Together the couple had 14 children, of whom Angelina Grimké was the youngest. Three children died in infancy.
Early years and religious activity
Both Mary and John Grimké were strong advocates of the traditional, upper-class, Southern values that permeated their rank of Charleston society. Mary would not permit the girls to socialize outside the prescribed elite social circles, and John remained a slaveholder his entire life.
Nicknamed “Nina,” young Angelina Grimké was very close to her older sister Sarah Moore Grimké, who, at the age of 13, persuaded her parents to allow her to be Angelina's godmother.

The two sisters maintained an intimate relationship throughout their lives, and lived together for most of their lives, albeit with several short periods of separation.
Even as a child, Grimké was described in family letters and diaries as the most self-righteous, curious and self-assured of all her siblings. In the biography, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina, historian Gerda Lerner writes, "It never occurred to that she should abide by the superior judgment of her male relatives or that anyone might consider her inferior, simply for being a girl." More so than her elder sister, Sarah, Angelina seemed to be naturally inquisitive and outspoken, a trait which often offended her rather traditional family and friends.
When the time came for Grimké's confirmation in the Episcopal Church at the age of 13, Angelina refused to recite the creed of faith. An inquisitive and rebellious girl, she concluded that she could not agree with it and would not complete the confirmation ceremony. Angelina converted to the Presbyterian faith in April 1826, aged

21.
Angelina was an active member of the Presbyterian church. A proponent of biblical study and interfaith education, she taught a Sabbath school class and also provided religious services to her family's slaves—a practice her mother originally frowned upon, but later participated in. Grimké became a close friend of the pastor of her church, Rev. William McDowell. McDowell was a northerner who had previously been the pastor of a Presbyterian church in New Jersey. Grimké and McDowell were both very opposed to the institution of slavery on the grounds that it was a morally deficient system that violated Christian law and human rights. McDowell advocated patience and prayer over direct action, and argued that abolishing slavery "would create even worse evils". Thus, in addition to petitioning, women were transgressing social mores by speaking in public. In response, a state convention of Massachusetts' Congregational ministers, meeting at the end of June, issued a pastoral letter condemning public work by women and urging local churches to close their doors against the Grimkés' meetings.
As the sisters spoke throughout Massachusetts during the summer of 1837, the controversy over women abolitionists' public and political work fueled a growing controversy over women's rights and duties, both within and outside the anti-slavery movement. Angelina responded to Catharine Beecher's letter with open letters of her own, "Letters to Catharine Beecher," printed first in The New England Spectator and The Liberator and then in book form in 1838. Sarah Grimké wrote Letters on the Province of Woman, addressed to Mary S. Parker, which appeared first in the Liberator before being published in book form. Addressed to the president of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, who in the wake of the pastoral letter wanted women abolitionists to withdraw from public work, Sarah's letters were a strong defense of women's right and duty to participate on equal terms with men in all such work.
In February, 1838, Grimké addressed a legislative committee of the Massachusetts State Legislature, becoming the first woman in the United States to address a legislative body.

She not only spoke against slavery, but defended women's right to petition: both as a moral-religious duty and as a political right. Abolitionist Robert F. Wallcut stated that “Angelina Grimké's serene, commanding eloquence enchained attention, disarmed prejudice and carried her hearers with her.”
Grimké's lectures were critical of Southern slaveholders, but also of Northerners who tacitly complied with the status quo by purchasing slave-made products and exploiting slaves through the commercial and economic exchanges they made with slaveowners in the South. They were met with a considerable amount of opposition, both because Angelina was a female and because she was an abolitionist.
Personal

life
In 1831, Grimké was courted by Edward Bettle, the son of Samuel Bettle and Jane Temple Bettle, a family of prominent Orthodox Friends. Diaries show that Bettle intended to marry Grimké, though he never actually proposed. Sarah supported the match. However, in the summer of 1832, a large cholera epidemic broke out in Philadelphia. Grimké agreed to take in Bettle's cousin Elizabeth Walton, who, unbeknownst to anyone at the time, was dying of the disease. Bettle, who regularly visited his cousin, contracted the disease and died from it shortly thereafter. Grimké was heartbroken and directed all of her energy into her activism.
Grimké first met Theodore Weld in October 1836, at the agent training convention. She was greatly impressed with Weld's speeches and wrote in a letter to a friend that he was “a man raised up by God and wonderfully qualified to plead the cause of the oppressed.” In the two years before they married, Weld encouraged Grimké's activism, arranging for many of her lectures and the publication of her writings. They confessed their love for each other in letters in February 1838. Grimké wrote to Weld stating she didn't know why he did not like her. He replied "you are full of pride and anger" and then in letters twice the size of the rest he wrote "And I have loved you since the first time I met you." They were married in Philadelphia on May 14, 1838 by a black minister and a white minister.
Although Weld was said to have been supportive of Grimké's desire to remain politically active after their marriage, Grimké eventually retreated to a life of domesticity due to failing health. Sarah lived with the couple in New Jersey, and the sisters continued to correspond and visit with their friends in the abolitionist and emerging women's rights movements. They operated a school in their home, and later a boarding school at Raritan Bay Union, a utopian community. At the school, they taught the children of other noted abolitionists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In the years after the Civil War, they raised funds to pay for the graduate education of their two mixed-race nephews, the sons of their brother Henry W. Grimké . The sisters paid for Archibald Henry Grimké and Rev. Francis James Grimké to attend Harvard Law School and Princeton Theological Seminary, respectively. Archibald became a lawyer and later an ambassador to Haiti and Francis became a Presbyterian minister. Both became leading civil rights activists. Archibald's daughter, Angelina Weld Grimké, became a poet and author.
Legacy
Angelina Grimké, like her sister Sarah, has only begun to receive the recognition she deserves in more recent years. Grimké is memorialized in Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party.
In 1998, Grimké, was inducted, posthumously, into the National Women's Hall of Fame. She is also remembered on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.
Important writings
Two of Grimké's most notable works were her Appeal to the Christian Women of the South and her series of letters to Catharine Beecher.
The essay also reflects Grimké's lifelong enthusiasm for the universal education of women and slaves. Her Appeal emphasizes the importance of women's educating their slaves or future laborers: "Should remain teach them, and have them taught the common branches of an English education; they have minds and those minds, ought to be improved."
Grimké's Letters are widely recognized as an early feminist argument, although only two of the letters address feminism and woman's suffrage. Letter XII reflects some of the rhetorical style of the Declaration of Independence and is indicative of Grimké's religious values. She argues that all humans are moral beings and should be judged as such, regardless of their sex: "Measure her rights and duties by the unerring standard of moral being ... and then the truth will be self-evident, that whatever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do. I recognize no rights but human rights – I know nothing of men's rights and women's rights; for in Christ Jesus, there is neither male nor female. It is my solemn conviction, that, until this principle of equality is recognised and embodied in practice, the Church can do nothing effectual for the permanent reformation of the world."
Angelina Grimké Weld is also a prominent character in Sue Monk Kidd's novel The Invention of Wings, which centers on the stories of Sarah Moore Grimké and a slave in the Grimké household named Handful.
References
Notes
Bibliography
Further reading
Robert K. Nelson,, Journal of Social History 37 : 663-679.
External links
. American Experience, PBS
Address at Pennsylvania Hall, 1838; in google books, Chapter 3

Angelina Emily Grimké Weld

Bibliography:
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