Angelina Grimkѐ
Who would have thought? A woman raised on a slave plantation, who had grown up with slaves would turn out to be an abolitionist. Not only an abolitionist but a woman. Speaking out against the thoughts of slavery and not only that, but speaking out against the thoughts of women. Angelina Grimké Weld, a woman not only who became an abolitionist, public speaker, and writer became one of the first women to speak out against slavery and “defying gender norms.”
Angelina was born on February 20 in 1805 to a family with 13 other siblings. Her father John Faucheraud Grimké and her mother Mary Smith owned a house in Charleston, South Carolina. They also owned a plantation in the country, and a great amount of slaves. Angelina had an important sister named Sarah Moore Grimké, (you will find out later why she is of importance). The father John believed women should be submissive to men so had not put his girls into school.
Angelina had already begun defying rules at the age of 13. She had her fair share of witnessing and feeling discrimination. She had begun teaching slaves how to read, holding prayer meetings, along with the pursuit of her family to secede slavery. As she had gotten older she converted from Episcopal religion to Quakerism.
When 1829 rolled around and Angelina joined her sister Sarah in Philadelphia, where both girls had become members of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Angelina was threatened that if she had ever returned home they would imprison her. She had become a teacher, which shocked me, because her father would not put her in school. Well she had learned a lot and had soon after gotten a little education in order to become a teacher and support her living. Angelina had became the first woman to address the Massachusetts State Legislature in February 1828, bringing a petition signed by 20,000 women seeking to end slavery.
In 1835 she had written a letter that would later be published without her permission. The letter was written to William Lloyd Garrison, an abolitionist publisher who had printed it in his newspaper, The Liberator. It had sent her career into bloom. Where in 1836 she published a little something called An Appeal to Christian Women of the South. It encouraged women to stand up in the south against slavery, and encouraged them to join the anti-slavery movement.
Sarah had stated that “[They were] a milestone on the road to the Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls” and “central to the feminist writings in the decades that followed.” Sarah was one of the first to compare the way women and slaves were treated similar, writing that “woman has no political existence . . . . She is only counted like the slaves of the south, to swell the number of lawmakers.”
Garrison often welcomed women to his American Antislavery Society. In 1837 Angelina and Sarah had become the American Antislavery Society’s first women agents. They toured New Jersey and New york where they then had a mission to j...
