Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Changing status of women in society
Women's suffrage movement
Women's suffrage movement
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Changing status of women in society
The Grimke Sisters
In the early 1900’s, women and African Americans did not have any rights. When standing up for their rights they were sometimes punished for their views. It was also undesirable for women to speak in public. However, that did not stop Sarah and Angelina Grimke, because they believed in their rights and that they could change these social statuses. They were the first prominent female abolitionists. They faced hardships like sexism and traitors because they were both women and against slavery.
Sarah and Angelina were raised by their father who was a judge and plantation owner. They witnessed front hand was slavery was like and this is why they disliked it. Their mother hardly paid attention to any of her 13 children. Sarah
…show more content…
who was 13 years older than Angelina, begged her parents to let her be Angelina’s godmother. Sarah then took charge in raising her sister. Sarah’s impact on being free to express her opinion came from her father and she rubbed off on Angelina (Maclean, Maggie). Sarah wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps and go to law school. Due to her not being a white man she had to give up that dream and was expected to marry and have babies with a rich white man. She decided she wanted more than that, and after taking her father to Pennsylvania due to health issues, while there she saw how liberal it was there. She enjoyed Pennsylvania and felt like this where she belonged, because of what she believed in . A few years after her father passed away she moved to Pennsylvania and became a Quaker. Angelina was influenced by her sister's decision and tried to pursue some abolishers around her in South Carolina. However, this pushed many more to go into hiding and caused her pamphlet Appeal to the Christian Women of the South to be banned from the state. Angelina joined Sarah in Pennsylvania and became a Quaker too. Then they began their journey of becoming prominent abolitionist and making speeches. The Quaker religion thought it unjust for women to be speaking in public. They also asked Angelina to take her pamphlet out of the newspaper that publisher William Lloyd Garrison added it to the paper without her permission. Angelina decided against the Quaker’s wishes. Sarah and Angelina moved to a more liberal Quaker area. Still, they saw it as unfit and left Quakerism permanently. The sisters moved on to New York City. There Angelina and Sarah became prominent abolitionist. The sisters met some other abolitionist there including, Theodore Dwight Weld. Theodore and Angelina eventually got married and had three kids together. The sisters were not only prominent abolitionist, but were for women rights too. According to certain standards women weren’t supposed to speak in public, this did not stop the Grimke sisters. They both believed in equal power for everyone, no matter someone’s race or gender. Sarah had a chance to speak at Massachusetts legislature, but she became ill. Angelina took her spot, which made her the first woman to speak a United States legislature. The sisters began touring from New York to New Jersey. Their first tour was very successful, however Catherine Beecher criticized the girls on not keeping their feminine side shown. Angelina replied back with her letter Letter to Catherine Beecher (Lewis, Jone). “Thou thinkest I have not been ' sufficiently informed in regard to the feelings and opinions of Christian females at the North ' on the subject of slavery ; for that in fact they hold the same principles with Abolitionists, although they condemn their measures” (Grimke, Angelina). Sarah’s weak point was public speaking, critics said she did not do well with her speeches. Angelina mesmerized the audience, but wasn’t a strong writer. That is what made the sisters equal. Sarah combined her writing with Angelina’s speaking. This is a cause on how they got people’s attention. Sarah stated “All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from our necks and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God intended us to occupy” (Grimke, Sarah). Sarah wanted them to stop treating them like they could not be citizens. She is proclaiming that Africans and women are strong enough to stand their grounds without someone holding them along the way. She wanted white men to give women and Africans a chance to be free. Sarah and Angelina wrote letters, books, and speeches that are from a religious standpoint.
They intended to bring people in religiously and show them that God did not approve of slavery. In one of Sarah’s letters called Epistle of the Clergyman of the South, she involved in the letter how Adam and Eve were created and stated; “The Lord God formed man of dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the Lord God said, it is not good that man should be alone, I will make him an help meet for him”(Genesis 2:7-18). Her belief was that God didn’t make a women for her to serve her husband. Instead they women are here to provide aid and to prevent man from getting …show more content…
lonely. Sarah and Angelina found out that their brother Henry Grimke had interracial children and the children were slaves to their white half-brother from Henry’s first marriage. The sisters helped the kids escape and brought them to live with them in New York. They gained their education and raised by their aunts (T, Nadia). Sarah and Angelina opened a school for all races to attend after her nephews came to New York. After the Civil War, the sisters moved to Boston. They wanted to become more active in the women’s rights movement. While there they served as officers of the association and with a protest Sarah and Angelina voted illegally. By their side was 42 other women wanting equal rights, and those women were partly there because of the Grimke sisters. Sarah and Angelina created many great speeches. Angelina’s most famous speech was given at Pennsylvania Hall and was about slavery. This speech caused a riot and Pennsylvania hall to be burned down (Grimke, Speech). Sarah found herself liking the women’s rights more than being a slavery abolitionist. Her famous speech was Women Subject Only To God. “Her influence is the source of mighty power”, said Sarah in her speech. Sarah argued that without women, men wouldn’t have a guide or an influence. The Grimke sisters worked for awareness on how slavery and women were treated. Sarah and Theodore Weld's wrote a book together called American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. This book helped influenced Harriet Stowe’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Gaydos, Tamara). However, due to Sarah being a woman, her name was taking off of the publication and only gave credit to Theodore. Sarah, once again put down because she was born a women. In the book Theodore and Sarah discussed what it was like being a slave owner and a slave. Sarah put her sister's story of witnessing a young slave boy who is crippled due to being beat by his owner. “Two millions seven hundred thousand persons in these States are in this condition” (Welds, Grimke). Angelina and Sarah wanted other southern abolitionist to riot and stand up for their beliefs. However, the South forbid anything anti-slavery to come in their states. On the night of Angelina’s last speech she had a stroke, which caused her to become paralyzed. This did not stop Angelina from sharing her beliefs, so she stopped with her speeches and turned solely to writing. Theodore and her published a book together called American Slavery As It Is. Sarah stood her grounds one last time when she tried to vote, however she was turned away.
Sarah died at the age of 84 in Boston. Angelina started having more constant strokes after the death of her sister. After the death of the sisters, their names soon were forgotten, Theodore couldn’t keep their names alive and soon died himself
The Grimke sisters wanted an undivided world. They didn’t get the chance to vote, or to see women gain their rights. The sisters proved to be prominent abolitionist and determined to get everyone their rights. Even though they were born on a slave plantation these sisters believed what they saw was wrong and took charge to help stop it. They are important factors to ending slavery and helping women gain their rights. With their important speeches, letters, pamphlets, and books these sisters worked together and became very influential.
Sarah and Angelina could have impacted many to stand up for their rights and beliefs. They faced many hardships, because they are women. The sisters never gave up, even when sick or on their death beds they both pushed for what they believed in. They tried to aid whoever they could and make the United States a better home for
everyone.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were some of the most powerful women in the U.S. in the 1800s. These two women had many things in common. They were both abolitionist, speakers, and authors. Susan herself was the NAWSA’s first president, and Elizabeth’s life efforts helped her bring up the 19th Amendment. I stated that everybody had the right to vote. Both, of these women had or were apart of a company were Susan managed and Elizabeth wrote. They were a powerful team they actually printed an illegal paper called the “Revolution”. They actually met each other for the first time in 1851.
It was the women’s who was charged with keeping the home in order. The destiny of a black women during the slave era were to absurdly be pushed to give offspring by a random slave men so he can ultimately be sold or be used in the plantation. Her societal purpose was to cook, sew, wash, clean the house, breastfeed her kids as well as breastfeeding her master’s offspring. Customarily black women were given domestic or demeaning work to show their inferiority within society if we look at the pyramid of different classes of people in that era. Black women represented a mother figure to attend to the needs of black men and children in her community. She was not compensated for the work she had performed. She was very much indispensable to the survival of her community. The black women experience to share the sweat and tears of her race in the antebellum era and the revolutionary period played a big role in her survival, and her humanity. Hers and others survival through that difficult antebellum time has led them to their contribution of the revolutionary period, and ultimately gave birth to freedom from
Harriet, Frederick, and Olaudah were all slaves sharing their stories and experiences in their lives as slaves. All of their stories were similar as they spoke of the cruelty, brutality and utter inhumaneness of the overseers and masters that enslaved them. The most common threads and similarity to their stories is that they fought for themselves and for others to escape the horrors of this immoral institution called slavery. They all realized the importance of education in determining their destiny and the destiny of all people under the grasps of oppression. Their participation in the antislavery movement helped to fuel the sentimentality that supported the abolishment of slavery all over the world.
Angelina Grimke and Sojourner Truth were both prominent American civil rights activists of the 19th century who focused on the abolition of slavery and women’s rights issues, respectively. While both of these women challenged the societal beliefs of the United States at the time regarding these civil rights issues, the rhetorical strategies used by each of these women to not only illustrate their respective arguments but also to raise social awareness of these issues was approached in very different fashions. Angelina Grimke promoted the use of white middle-class women’s positions in the household to try to influence the decision makers, or men, around them. On the other hand, Sojourner Truth, a former slave turned women’s rights activist,
Although these women did not live to cast their votes in an election, their hard work did pay off by obtaining women the right to own property and fight for custody of their children in a court of law. In this day women cannot imagine being thrown out of their homes because their husband had died or being forced to leave their children in order to escape an abusive relationship.
Beginning in the 1830s, white and black women in the North became active in trying to end slavery. These Women were inspired in many cases by the religious revivals sweeping the nation. While women in the movement at first focused their efforts upon emancipation, the intense criticsm that greeted their activities gradually pushed some of them toward an advocacy of women's rights as well. They discovered that they first had to defend their right to speak at all in a society in which women were expected to restrict their activities to a purely domestic sphere. Angelina and Sarah Grimke , left South Carolina because they were swept up in the religious current called the "Second Great Awakening" and felt that Philadelphia Quakers offered a surer form of saving their souls than the Protestant ministers of Charleston. During their influential speaking tour in 1837, about the anti-slavery movement, everyone wanted to hear them, so they broke the prohibitions against women speaking in public and, when clergymen opposed such public speaking by women, they launched the women's rights movement.
Up until and during the mid -1800’s, women were stereotyped and not given the same rights that men had. Women were not allowed to vote, speak publically, stand for office and had no influence in public affairs. They received poorer education than men did and there was not one church, except for the Quakers, that allowed women to have a say in church affairs. Women also did not have any legal rights and were not permitted to own property. Overall, people believed that a woman only belonged in the home and that the only rule she may ever obtain was over her children. However, during the pre- Civil war era, woman began to stand up for what they believed in and to change the way that people viewed society (Lerner, 1971). Two of the most famous pioneers in the women’s rights movement, as well as abolition, were two sisters from South Carolina: Sarah and Angelina Grimké.
Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Olaudah Equiano all have extremely interesting slave narratives. During their lives, they faced plenty of racist discrimination and troubling moments. They were all forced into slavery at an awfully young age and they all had to fight for their freedom. In 1797, Truth was born into slavery in New York with the name of Isabella Van Wagener. She was a slave for most of her life and eventually got emancipated. Truth was an immense women’s suffrage activist. She went on to preach about her religious life, become apart of the abolitionist movement, and give public speeches. Truth wrote a well-known personal experience called An Account of an Experience with Discrimination, and she gave a few famous speech called Ain’t I a Woman? and Speech at New York City Convention. In 1818, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery in Tuckahoe, Maryland. When he was older, he made an escape plan by disguising himself as a sailor and going on a train to New York. When he became a free man, he changed his name to Frederick Douglass and married Anna Murray. He went on to give many speeches and he became apart of the Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass wrote his story From My Bondage and My Freedom and became a publisher for a newspaper. In 1745, Olaudah Equiano was born in Essaka, Nigeria. Equiano and his sister were both kidnapped and put on the middle passage from Africa to Barbados and then finally to Virginia. He eventually saved enough money to buy his freedom and got married to Susanna Cullen. Equiano wrote his story down and named it From the Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. He spent the rest of his life promoting the abolition movement. Throughout the personal slave narra...
In the book Women in the Civil War, by Mary Massey, the author tells about how American women had an impact on the Civil War. She mentioned quite a few famous and well-known women such as, Dorothea Dix and Clara Barton, who were nurses, and Pauline Cushman and Belle Boyd, who were spies. She also mentioned black abolitionists, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, feminist Susan B. Anthony, and many more women. Massey talks about how the concept of women changed as a result of the war. She informed the readers about the many accomplishments made by those women. Because of the war, women were able to achieve things, which caused for them to be viewed differently in the end as a result.
According to Charles G. Finney, the role of the church is to reform society (Doc. B). In 1834, he said, "When the churches are...awakened and reformed, the reformation and salvation of sinners will follow." Finney had been influenced by Second Great Awakening ideals. He goes on to say that "drunkards, harlots, and infidels" would also be converted do to reform by the church. In this sense, the Second Great Awakening helped expand democratic ideals by bettering the moral standards of the common man. In 1835, Another example of democratic growth can be shown by Document C, where Patrick Reason created an engraving depicting a black female slave in chains and shackles. Above her is the quote, Am I not a woman and a sister?' This reflects how the abolition and women's movements often tied into one another since both of these movements helped expand democratic ideals in that they desired increased rights, such as suffrage for minorities. For example, The Grimke sisters, Angelina and Sarah were southern abolitionists who also played a role in the Women's Movement.
In their quarters, slaves expressed themselves with some what more freedom from white slave owners. Religion provided a feel of similar freedom and also gave slaves mental support. By attending church, slaves created a Christianity that emphasized salvation for every race, including slaves.
One example that the author uses to support the thesis is when she explains how the Grimke took a pioneering speaking tour that took place ten years before the Seneca falls convention. This convention was designed for the girls to demand their rights as citizens. The author explains how the girls would have some key struggles that they would face during this convention but with everything that the Grimke sisters had done and come up with they knew that these women’s voices would be heard. In 1838, a woman who stood up for her sex and expressed how she felt about women’s rights was emancipated as a “new women” half a century before the phase had been coined. This example supports the thesis because Gerda emphasizes that even though the women
...s that they weren’t just slaves; they were women, sisters, wives, and daughters, just like the white women (DOC C). The women of this time period reached out to expand ideals by showing men that women were going to be involved in political affairs, and they had a right to do so.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth-century, notions of freedom for Black slaves and White women were distinctively different than they are now. Slavery was a form of exploitation of black slaves, whom through enslavement, lost their humanity and freedom, and were subjected to dehumanizing conditions. African women and men were often mistreated through similar ways, especially when induced to labor, they would eventually become a genderless individual in the sight of the master. Despite being considered “genderless” for labor, female slaves suddenly became women who endured sexual violence. Although a white woman was superior to the slaves, she had little power over the household, and was restricted to perform additional actions without the consent of their husbands. The enslaved women’s notion to conceive freedom was different, yet similar to the way enslaved men and white women conceived freedom. Black women during slavery fought to resist oppression in order to gain their freedom by running away, rebel against the slaveholders, or by slowing down work. Although that didn’t guarantee them absolute freedom from slavery, it helped them preserve the autonomy and a bare minimum of their human rights that otherwise, would’ve been taken away from them. Black
In conclusion, women were considered property and slave holders treated them as they pleased. We come to understand that there was no law that gave protection to female slaves. Harriet Jacob’s narrative shows the true face of how slaveholders treated young female slave. The female slaves were sexually exploited which damaged them physically and psychologically. Furthermore it details how the slave holder violated the most sacred commandment of nature by corrupting the self respect and virtue of the female slave. Harriet Jacob writes this narrative not to ask for pity or to be sympathized but rather to show the white people to be aware of how female slaves constantly faced sexual exploitation which damaged their body and soul.