The Grimkes were the first to apply the abolitionist doctrine of universal freedom and equality to the status of women. When the prominent writer Catharine Beecher reprimanded the sisters for stepping outside “the domestic and social sphere,” urging them to accept the fact that “heaven” had designated man “the superior” and woman “the subordinate,” Angelina Grimke issued a stinging answer. “I know nothing,” she wrote, “of men’s rights and women’s rights. My doctrine, then is, that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do.” Like their predecessors Frances Wright and Maria Stewart, the Grimke sisters soon retired from the fray, unwilling to endure the intense criticism to which they were subjected. But their writings helped to spark the movement for women’s rights, which arose in the 1840s.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, the key organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, were veterans of the antislavery crusade. In 1840, they had traveled to London as delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention, only to be barred from participating because of their sex. The Seneca Falls Convention, a gathering on behalf of women’s rights held in the upstate New York town where Stanton lived, raised the issue of woman’s suffrage for the first time. Stanton, the principal author, modeled the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments on the Declaration of Independence (see the Appendix for the full text). But the document added “women” to Jefferson’s axiom “all men are created equal,” and in place of a list of injustices committed by George III, it condemned the “injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.” The first to be listed was denying her the right to vote. As Stanton told the convention, only the vote would make woman “free as man is free,” since in a democratic society, freedom was impossible without access to the ballot. The argument was simple and irrefutable: in the words of Lydia Maria Child, “either the theory of our government [the democratic principle that government rests on the will of the people] is false, or women have a right to vote.”
From Angelina Grimke,
Letter in The Liberator (August 2, 1837)
The daughters of a prominent South Carolina slaveholder, Angelina and Sarah Grimke became abolitionists after being sent to Philadelphia for education. In this article, Angelina Grimke explains how participation in the movement against slavery led her to a greater recognition of women’s lack of basic freedoms.
Since I engaged in the investigation of the rights of the slave, I have necessarily been led to a better understanding of my own; for I have found the Anti-Slavery cause to be ... the school in which human rights are more fully investigated, and better understood and taught, than in any other [reform] enterprise.... Here we are led to examine why human beings have any rights. It is because they are moral beings. ... Now it naturally occurred to me, that if rights were founded in moral being, then the circumstance of sex could not give to man higher rights and responsibilities, than to woman....
When I look at human beings as moral beings, all distinction in sex sinks to insignificance and nothingness; for I believe it regulates rights and responsibilities no more than the color of the skin or the eyes. My doctrine, then is, that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do.... This regulation of duty by the mere circumstance of sex ... has led to all that [numerous] train of evils flowing out of the anti-christian doctrine of masculine and feminine virtues. By this doctrine, man has been converted into the warrior, and clothed in sternness... whilst woman has been taught to lean upon an arm of flesh, to ... be admired for her personal charms, and caressed and humored like a spoiled child, or converted into a mere drudge to suit the convenience of her lord and master.... It has robbed woman of... the right to think and speak and acton all great moral questions, just as men think and speak and act....
The discussion of the wrongs of slavery has opened the way for the discussion of other rights, and the ultimate result will most certainly be ... the letting of the oppressed of every grade and description go free.
From Frederick Douglass,
Speech on July 5, 1852, Rochester, New York
One of the most prominent reform leaders of his era, Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838 and soon became an internationally known writer and orator against slavery. His speech of July 1852 condemned the hypocrisy of a nation that proclaimed its devotion to freedom while practicing slavery. It was reprinted in 1855 in his autobiography, My Bondage and Mp Freedom.
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why ami called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? ... Such is not the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.... The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me....
For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships,... acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries... confessing and worshiping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!...
Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? That he is the rightful owner of his body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? ... that men have a natural right to freedom?... To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him....
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July ? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery—a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
QUESTIONS
1. What consequences does Grimke believe follow from the idea of rights being founded in the individual’s “moral being”?
2. How does Douglass turn the ideals proclaimed by white Americans into weapons against slavery?
3. What do these documents suggest about the language and arguments employed by abolitionists?
Portrait of feminist Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) from an undated daguerreotype.
Seneca Falls marked the beginning of the seventy-year struggle for woman’s suffrage. The vote, however, was hardly the only issue raised at the convention. The Declaration of Sentiments condemned the entire structure of inequality that denied women access to education and employment, gave husbands control over the property and wages of their wives and custody of children in the event of divorce, deprived women of independent legal status after they married, and restricted them to the home as their “sphere of action.” Equal rights became the rallying cry of the early movement for women’s rights, and equal rights meant claiming access to all the prevailing definitions of freedom.