upon which you stand is holy ground: never—never surrender
it. If you surrender it, the hope of the slave is extinguished.. . .
[I]t is my deep, solemn deliberate conviction, that this is a
cause worth dying for. ”7 Garrison published the letter in his
abolitionist paper, The Liberator, with a foreword identifying
Angelina as the member of a prominent slaveholding family.
She was widely condemned by friends and acquaintances for
disgracing her family, and Sarah, too, condemned her.
In 1836, she sealed her fate as a traitor to her race and to
her family by publishing an abolitionist tract called “An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. ” For the first time, maybe in the history of the world, a woman addressed other
women and demanded that they unite as a revolutionary force
to overthrow a system of tyranny. And for the first time on
Amerikan soil, a woman demanded that white women identify
themselves with the welfare, freedom, and dignity of black
women:
Let [women] embody themselves in societies, and send petitions
up to their different legislatures, entreating their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, to abolish the institution of slavery; no longer to subject woman to the scourge and the chain, to mental
darkness and moral degradation; no longer to tear husbands from
their wives, and children from their parents; no longer to make
men, women, and children, work without wages; no longer to
make their lives bitter in hard bondage; no longer to reduce
American citizens to the abject condition of slaves, of “chattels
personal; ” no longer to barter the image of God in human shambles for corruptible things such as silver and gold. 8
Angelina exhorted white Southern women, for the sake of all
women, to form antislavery societies; to petition legislatures;
to educate themselves to the harsh realities of black slavery; to
speak out against black slavery to family, friends, and acquaintances; to demand that slaves be freed in their own families; to pay wages to any slaves who are not freed; to act against the law by freeing slaves wherever possible; and to act
against the law by teaching slaves to read and to write. In the
first political articulation of civil disobedience as a principle of
action, she wrote:
But some of you will say, we can neither free our slaves nor
teach them to read, for the laws of our state forbid it. Be not
surprised when I say such wicked laws ought to be no barrier in
the way of your duty. . . If a law commands me to sin I will
break it; if it calls me to suffer, I will let it take its course unresistingly. The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified sub
mission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is
the doctrine of despotism... 9
This tract was burned by Southern postmasters; Angelina was
warned in newspaper editorials never to return to the South;
and she was repudiated by her family. After the publication of
her “Appeal, ” she became a full-time abolitionist organizer.
Also in 1836, in a series of letters to Catherine Beecher,
Angelina articulated the first fully conceived feminist argument against the oppression of women: Now, I believe it is woman’s right to have a choice in all the laws
and regulations by which she is to be governed, whether in
Church or State; and that the present arrangements of society. . .
are a violation of human rights, a rank usurpation of power, a
violent seizure and confiscation of what is sacredly and inalienably hers—thus inflicting upon woman outrageous wrongs, working mischief incalculable in the social circle, and in its influence on the world producing only evil, and that continually. 10
Her feminist consciousness had grown out of her abolitionist
commitment: “The investigation of the rights of the slave has
led me to a better understanding of my own. ”11
Also in 1836, Sarah Grimke published a pamphlet called
“Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States. ” In it, she refutes
the claims by Southern clergy that biblical slavery provided a
justification for Amerikan slavery. From this time on, Sarah
and Angelina were united publicly and privately in their political work.
In 1837, the Grimke sisters attended an antislavery convention in New York City. There they asserted that white and black women were a sisterhood; that the institution of black
slavery was nourished by Northern race prejudice; and that
white women and black men also shared a common condition:
[The female slaves] are our countrywomen— they are our sisters;
and to us as women, they have a right to look for sympathy with
their sorrows, and effort and prayer for their rescue. . . Our people have erected a false standard by which to judge man’s char
acter. Because in the slave-holding States colored men are
plundered and kept in abject ignorance, are treated with disdain
and scorn, so here, too in profound deference to the South, we
refuse to eat, or ride, or walk, or associate, or open our institutions of learning, or even our zoological institutions to people of color, unless they visit them in the capacity of servants, of menials
in humble attendance upon the Anglo-American. Who ever heard
of a more wicked absurdity in a Republican country?
Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man’s
wrongs, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education. 12
In 1837, public reaction against the Grimke sisters became
fierce. The Massachusetts clergy published a pastoral letter
denouncing female activism:
We invite your attention to the dangers which at present seem
to threaten the female character with wide-spread and permanent
injury.
. . . We cannot. . . but regret the mistaken conduct of those
who encourage females to bear an obtrusive and ostentatious part
in measures of reform, and [we cannot] countenance any of that
sex who so far forget themselves as to itinerate in the character
of public lecturers and teachers. We especially deplore the intimate acquaintance and promiscuous conversation of females with regard to things which ought not to be named; by which
that modesty and delicacy which is the charm of domestic life,
and which constitutes the true influence of woman in society, is
consumed, and the way opened, as we apprehend, for degeneracy
and ruin. 13
Replying to the pastoral letter, Angelina wrote: “We are
placed very unexpectedly in a very trying situation, in the forefront of an entirely new contest— a contest for the rights of woman as a moral, intelligent and responsible being. ”14 Sarah’s reply, which was later published as part of a systematic analysis of women’s oppression called Letters on the Equality
of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, read in part as
follows:
[The pastoral letter] says, “We invite your attention to the dangers which at present seem to threaten the f e m a l e c h a r a c t e r with wide-spread and permanent injury. ” I rejoice that they have
called the attention of my sex to this subject, because I believe if
woman investigates it, she will soon discover that danger is impending, though from a totally different source. . . danger from those who, having long held the reins of usurped authority,
are unwilling t
o permit us to fill that sphere which God created
us to move in, and who have entered into league to crush the
immortal mind of woman. I rejoice, because I am persuaded that
the rights of woman, like the rights of slaves, need only be examined to be understood and asserted, even by some of those who are now endeavoring to smother the irrepressible desire for
mental and spiritual freedom which glows in the breast of many,
who hardly dare to speak their sentiments. 15
In this confrontation with the Massachusetts clergy, the
women’s rights movement was bom in the United States. Two
women, speaking for all the oppressed of their kind, resolved
to transform society in the name of, and for the sake of,
women. The work of Angelina and Sarah Grimke, so profound in its political analysis of tyranny, so visionary in its revolutionary urgency, so unyielding in its hatred of human
bondage, so radical in its perception of the common oppression of all women and black men, was the fiber from which the cloth of the first feminist movement was woven. Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone
— these were the daughters of the Grimke sisters, birthed
through their miraculous labor.
It is often said that all those who advocated women’s rights
were abolitionists, but that not all abolitionists advocated
women’s rights. The bitter truth is that most male abolitionists
opposed women’s rights. Frederick Douglass, a former black
slave who strongly supported women’s rights, described this
opposition in 1848, right after the Seneca Falls Convention:
A discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with far
more complacency by many of what are called the wise and the
good of our land, than would be a discussion of the rights of
women. It is, in their estimation, to be guilty of evil thoughts, to
think that woman is entitled to equal rights with man. Many who
have at last made the discovery that the negroes have some rights
as well as other members of the human family, have yet to be
convinced that women are entitled to any.. . . [A] number of
persons of this description actually abandoned the anti-slavery
cause, lest by giving their influence in that direction they might
possibly be giving countenance to the dangerous heresy that
woman, in respect to her rights, stands on an equal footing with
man. In the judgment of such persons, the American slave system, with all its concomitant horrors, is less to be deplored than this wicked idea. 16
In the abolition movement as in most movements for social
change, then and now, women were the committed; women
did the work that had to be done; women were the backbone
and muscle that supported the whole body. But when women
made claims for their own rights, they were dismissed contemptuously, ridiculed, or told that their own struggle was self-indulgent, secondary to the real struggle. As Elizabeth Cady
Stanton wrote in her reminiscences:
During the six years [of the Civil War, when women] held their
own claims in abeyance to those of the slaves. . . and labored to
inspire the people with enthusiasm for [emancipation] they were
highly honored as “wise, loyal, and clearsighted. ” But when the
slaves were emancipated, and these women asked that they
should be recognized in the reconstruction as citizens of the Republic, equal before the law, all these transcendent virtues vanished like dew before the morning sun. And thus it ever is: so long as woman labors to second man’s endeavors and exalt his
sex above her own her virtues pass unquestioned; but when she
dares to demand rights and privileges for herself, her motives,
manners, dress, personal appearance, and character are subjects
for ridicule and detraction. 17
Women had, as Stanton pointed out, “stood with the negro,
thus far, on equal ground as ostracized classes, outside the
political paradise”; 18 but most male abolitionists, and the
Republican party which came to represent them, had no
commitment to the civil rights of women, let alone to the
radical social transformation demanded by feminists. These
male abolitionists had, instead, a commitment to male dominance, an investment in male privilege, and a sustaining belief in male supremacy.
In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment which enfranchised
black men was ratified. In this very amendment, the word
“male” was introduced into the United States Constitution for
the first time—this to insure that the Fourteenth Amendment
would not, even accidentally, license suffrage or other legal
rights for women.
This betrayal was contemptible. Abolitionist men had betrayed the very women whose organizing, lecturing, and pamphleteering had effected abolition. Abolitionist men had
betrayed one half the population of former black slaves—
black women who had no civil existence under the Fourteenth
Amendment. Black men joined with white men to deny black
women civil rights. Abolitionists joined with former slaveholders; former male slaves joined with former slaveholders; white and black men joined together to close male ranks
against white and black women. The consequences for the
black woman were as Sojourner Truth prophesied in 1867,
one year after the Fourteenth Amendment was proposed:
I come from. . . the country of the slave. They have got their liberty—so much good luck to have slavery partly destroyed; not entirely. I want it root and branch destroyed. Then we will all be
their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if
colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you
see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will
be just as bad as it was before. 19
If slavery is ever to be destroyed “root and branch, ” women
will have to destroy it. Men, as their history attests, will only
pluck its buds and pick its flowers.
I want to ask you to commit yourselves to your own free
dom; I want to ask you not to settle for anything less, not to
compromise, not to barter, not to be deceived by empty promises and cruel lies. I want to remind you that slavery must be destroyed “root and branch, ” or it has not been destroyed at
all. I want to ask you to remember that we have been slaves
for so long that sometimes we forget that we are not free. I
want to remind you that we are not free. I want to ask you to
commit yourselves to a women’s revolution— a revolution of
all women, by all women, and for all women; a revolution
aimed at digging out the roots of tyranny so that it cannot
grow anymore.
9
The Root C ause
And the things best to know are first principles and causes.
For through them and from them all other things may be
known. . .
—Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I
I want to talk to you tonight about some realities and some
possibilities. The realities are brutal and savage; the possibilities may seem to you, quite frankly, impossible. I want to remind you that there was a time when everyone believed that
the earth was flat. All navigation was based on this belief. All
maps were drawn to the specifications of this b
elief. I call it a
belief, but then it was a reality, the only imaginable reality. It
was a reality because everyone believed it to be true. Everyone believed it to be true because it appeared to be true. The earth looked flat; there was no circumstance in which it did
not have, in the distances, edges off which one might fall;
people assumed that, somewhere, there was the final edge beyond which there was nothing. Imagination was circumscribed, as it most often is, by inherently limited and culturally conditioned physical senses, and those senses determined that the earth was flat. This principle of reality was not only theoretical; it was acted on. Ships never sailed too far in any direction because no one wanted to sail off the edge of the earth; no one
wanted to die the dreadful death that would result from such a
Delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, September 26, 1975.
reckless, stupid act. In societies in which navigation was a
major activity, the fear of such a fate was vivid and terrifying.
Now, as the story goes, somehow a man named Christopher
Columbus imagined that the earth was round. He imagined
that one could reach the Far East by sailing west. How he
conceived of this idea, we do not know; but he did imagine it,
and once he had imagined it, he could not forget it. For a long
time, until he met Queen Isabella, no one would listen to him
or consider his idea because, clearly, he was a lunatic. If anything was certain, it was that the earth was flat. Now we look at pictures of the earth taken from outer space, and we do not
remember that once there was a universal belief that the earth
was flat.
This story has been repeated many times. Marie Curie got
the peculiar idea that there was an undiscovered element
which was active, ever-changing, alive. All scientific thought
was based on the notion that all the elements were inactive,
inert, stable. Ridiculed, denied a proper laboratory by the
scientific establishment, condemned to poverty and obscurity,
Marie Curie, with her husband, Pierre, worked relentlessly to