156 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865since there was a higher law they had to observe. “If a law commands me to sin I will
break it,” Angelina insisted; “the doctrine of blind obedience ... to any human
power ... is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans
and Christians.” And to underline her point, that the women of the South could and
should act, she cited a list of heroic deeds, from the Bible and contemporary times.
Who had performed such deeds? she rhetorically asked, after describing each one of
them. Her triumphant answer became a refrain. “It was a woman.” “The women of
the South can overthrow this horrible system of oppression and cruelty, licentiousness
and wrong,” Angelina concluded. Her “Sisters in Christ” could and should act. In
this Appeal, the cause of abolition and the cause of feminism were linked, not least
because white Southern women were offered the possibility of affirming their
womanhood, and their capacity for significant political action, in and through
working toward the end of slavery.
Angelina Grimke also wrote more directly about the feminist cause only a year
after the Appeal, in her Letters to Catharine Beecher. Here, in response to Beecher’s
argument that women should restrict themselves to the domestic sphere, she insisted
that there were no specifically masculine and feminine rights, no such thing as “men’s
rights and women’s rights” but only “human rights.” Humanity was indivisible, the
doctrines of liberty and equality had a universal application; and woman should be
regarded “as a companion, a co-worker, an equal” of man not “a mere appendage of
his being, an instrument of his convenience and pleasure.” Sarah Moore Grimke was
lecturing for the antislavery movement with her sister at this time; and, while
Angelina was writing her Letters to Catharine Beecher, Sarah in her turn was preparing
her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Women (1837–1838). The
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes are just as resistant as the Letters to Catharine
Beecher are to the idea that a woman’s place is necessarily in the home. Women were
customarily trained “to attract the notice and win the attentions of men,” she
observed, “brought up with the dangerous and absurd idea that marriage is a kind of
preferment, and that to be able to keep their husband’s house, and render his situation
comfortable, is the end of her being.” To such notions, Sarah offered her own
alternative: what was needed, she argued, was for women to be treated as equals, in
terms of both educational opportunity and vocation. A “complete knowledge of
household affairs” might be “an indispensable requisite in a woman’s education,” not
least because most women would continue to find their satisfactions in the home.
But even these women required “mental cultivation” for the proper performance of
“their sacred duties as mothers.” Other women required it for other kinds of work, in
which by right they should be paid at the same level as men. And all women, without
exception, required it so as to achieve “that self-respect which conscious equality
would engender”; for too long, Sarah insisted, women had been educated “to regard
themselves as inferior creatures.” Like so many others concerned with the condition
of American women in the nineteenth century, Sarah saw her “sisters” as
fundamentally powerless and education as a vital source of empowerment. Like
some of them, too, including her own sister, she saw that impotence at its most
extreme in the female slaves of the South. “Women are bought and sold in our slaveGGray_c02.indd 156ray_c 02 .indd 156 8 8/1/2011 7:54:41 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 41 AM