biography
| name: |
Grimké, Sarah Moore
|
pronunciation:
[grimkay]
| sex:
| female
|
| lived:
| (1792–1873)
|
| biography:
| Abolitionist and women's-rights activist, born in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. The sister of Angelina Grimké and the daughter of a slave-owning judge, she was educated by tutors, and had from an early age become uncomfortable with the practice of slavery. Visiting Philadelphia in 1819, she was moved by the Quakers' rejection of slavery, and in 1821 she moved there and joined the Society of Friends. For several years she confined herself to religious and charitable causes, but when her younger sister Angelina joined her (1829) and went public with her own attacks on slavery (1835), Sarah spoke out against the Philadelphia Quakers' own discrimination against African-Americans, and moved to New York City (1836). She then published her first work on slavery, Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States (1836), in which she attacked the argument that slavery was justified because it was recognized in the Bible. The Grimké sisters themselves became controversial by their insistence on speaking before ‘mixed’ audiences of men and women, and soon Sarah was writing Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women (1838). After Angelina married the abolitionist Theodore Weld in 1838, Sarah lived with them and followed them on their moves first to New Jersey and then to Massachusetts, where she helped raise their three children. She ceased lecturing in public but continued to write and petition against slavery, and for many of the years between 1848 and 1867 she taught to help support their family. The sisters did not publish much against slavery after 1839, but they continued to identify with the women's-rights movement. |
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