All these activities enabled women to carve out a place in the public sphere. But it was participation in abolitionism that inspired the early movement for women’s rights. In working for the rights of the slave, not a few women developed a new understanding of their own subordinate social and legal status. The daughters of a prominent South Carolina slaveholder, Angelina and Sarah Grimke had been converted first to Quakerism and then abolitionism while visiting Philadelphia. During the 1830s, they began to deliver popular lectures that offered a scathing condemnation of slavery from the perspective of those who had witnessed its evils firsthand.
The Grimke sisters were neither the first women to lecture in public nor the first to be feverishly condemned by self-proclaimed guardians of female modesty. Frances Wright, a Scottish-born follower of reformer Robert Owen, spoke at New York’s Hall of Science in the late 1820s and early 1830s, on subjects ranging from communitarianism to slavery, women’s rights, and the plight of northern laborers. One New York newspaper called Wright a “female monster” for “shamefully obtruding herself upon the public.” Maria Stewart, a black Bostonian, in 1832 became the first American woman to lecture to mixed male and female audiences. She, too, received intense criticism. “I have made myself contemptible in the eyes of many,” Stewart wrote. “This is the land of freedom,” she added, “and we claim our rights,” including the right to speak in public.
Stewart left Boston in 1833 and rarely lectured again. The Grimke sisters, however, used the controversy over their speeches as a springboard for a vigorous argument against the idea that taking part in assemblies, demonstrations, and lectures was unfeminine. Outraged by the sight of females sacrificing all “modesty and delicacy” by appearing on the public lecture platform, a group of Massachusetts clergymen denounced the sisters. In reply, they forthrightly defended not only the right of women to take part in political debate but also their right to share the social and educational privileges enjoyed by men. “Since I engaged in the investigation of the rights of the slave,” declared Angelina Grimke, “I have necessarily been led to a better understanding of my own.” Her sister Sarah proceeded to publish Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1838), a powerful call for equal rights for women and a critique of the notion of separate spheres. The book raised numerous issues familiar even today, including what later generations would call “equal pay for equal work.” Why, Sarah Grimke wondered, did male teachers invariably receive higher wages than women, and a male tailor earn “two or three times as much” as a female counterpart “although the work done by each may be equally good?”