EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: LUCRETIA COFFIN MOTT P/43

                                                              Read Part One HERE

In this post I continue to focus on a woman named Lucretia Coffin Mott. She lived from 1793 -1880.

In 1818 Lucretia began to speak at religious meetings, and three years later she was accepted as a Minister of the Friends. She began to travel about the country in the 1820's  lecturing on religion and questions of social reform, including temperance, the abolition of slavery, and peace.

In 1833 Lucretia attended the founding convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and immediately thereafter she led in organizing its women's auxiliary, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, of which she was chosen President. She met opposition within the Society of Friends when she spoke of abolition, and attempts were made to strip her of her ministry and membership. In 1837 she helped organise the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, and in May 1838 her home was almost attacked by a mob after the burning of the Pennsylvania Hall, Philadelphia, where the convention had been meeting. Rebuffed as a delegate to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 because of her sex, Lucretia still managed to make her views known.

P.S. In will continue the story on Lucretia coffin Mott in my next post.

Read Part Forty-Four HERE

 

EVANGELICAL WOMAN IN EARLY 1800: LUCRETIA MOTT P/42

                                                               Read Part One HERE

In this post I focus on a woman named Lucretia Coffin Mott. She lived from 1793 - 1880.

Lucretia was born on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. Her father's work as a ship's captain kept him away from his family for long stretches and could be hazardous - so much so that he moved his family to Boston and became a merchant when Lucretia was ten years old.

While in Boston, Lucretia attended public school for two years in accordance with her father's wish that she become familiar with the workings of democratic principles. At age 13 she was sent to a Quaker's boarding school near Poughkeepsie, New York, where two years later she was engaged as an assistant and later as a teacher. It was then that her interest in women's right began. Solely because of her sex, she was paid only half the salary male teachers were receiving. 

Lucretia and James Mott, a fellow teacher, were married in 1811. They had six children, five of whom survived adulthood. 

P.S. I will continue the story on Lucretia Mott in my next post.

Please read Part Forty-Three HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: ANGELINA GRIMKE WELD P/41

                                                    Read Part One HERE

In this post I continue to focus on a woman named Angelina Grimke Weld. She lived from 1805 - 1879.

As the sisters spoke throughout Massachusetts during the summer of 1837, the controversy over women abolitionists' public and political work fueled a growing controversy over women's right and duties, both within and outside the anti-slavery movement. Angelina wrote a number of letters in defense of women's right and duties to participate on equal terms with men in all such work.

In February 1838, Angelina addressed a committee of the Massachusetts State Legislature, becoming the first woman in the United States to address a legislative body. She not only spoke against slavery, but defended women's right to petition, both as a mere-religious duty and as a political right.

On 17 May, 1838, two days after her marriage to Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina spoke at a racially integrated abolitionist gathering at the new Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia. As she spoke, an unruly mob outside the hall grew more and more agressive, shouting threats to Angelina and other attendees. Rather than stop her speech, Angelina incorporated their interruptions in her speech. Rioters outside the building began to throw bricks and stones, breaking the widows of the hall. Angelina continued the speech, and after her conclusion, the racially diverse group of abolitionist women left the building arm-in-arm.

Angelina's lectures were critical not only of Southern slaveholders, but also of Northeners who tacitly complied with the status quo, by purchasing slave-made products and exploiting slaves through the commercial and economic exchanges they made with the slave owners in the South. They were met with a considerable amount of opposition, both because Angelina was a female and because she was an abolitionist.

Some time later Angelina retired from public speaking but continued to attend anti-slavery meetings and write abolitionist tracts. She and her husband, together with her sister Sarah, moved to New Jersey where they bought a farm and the sisters made a living as teachers.

Angelina suffered a series of strokes immediately following her sister's death in 1873, which left her paralysed for the last six years of her life. She died in 1879.

Read Part Forty-Two HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: ANGELINA GRIMKE WELD P/40

                                                    Read Part One HERE

In this post I continue to focus on a woman named Angelina Grimke Weld. She lived from 1805 - 1879.

In the fall of 1836, Angelina and her sister Sarah were invited to New York City to attend the American Anti-Slavery Society's two week training conference for anti-slavery agents; they were the only two women in the group. There they met Theodore Dwight Well, a trainer and one of the Society's leading agents. Angelina and Theodore later married. During the following winter the sisters were commissioned to speak at women's meetings and organise women's anti-slavery societies in the New York City region and nearby New Jersey. In May 1837, they joined leading women abolitionists from Boston, New York and Philadelphia in holding the first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, held to expand women's anti-slavery actions to other states.

Immediately, after this convention, the sisters went by invitation of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society to Massachusetts, New England. Abolitionists were accused of distorting and exaggerating the realities of slavery, and the sisters were asked to speak throughout New England on their firsthand knowledge. Almost from the beginning, their meetings were open to men. Although defenders later claimed that the sisters addressed mixed audiences only because men insisted on coming, primary evidence indicates that their meetings were open to men by deliberate design, not only to carry their message to male as well as female hearers, but as a means of breaking women's fetter and establish "a new order of things." Thus, in addition to petitioning, women were transgressing social mores by speaking in public. In response, a state convention of Massachusett's Congregational ministers, meeting at the end of June, issued a pastoral letter condemning public work by women and urging local churches to close their doors to the Grimkes' presentations.

Read Part Forty-One HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMAN IN EARLY 1800: ANGELINA GRIMKE WELD P/39

                                                    Read Part One HERE

In this post I continue to focus on a woman named Angelina Grimke Weld. She lived from 1805-1879.

For a time in Philadelphia, Angelina lived with her widowed sister, Anna Grimke Frost. The younger woman was struck by the lack of options for widowed women, which during this period was mostly limited to remarriage. Generally, women of the upper classes did not work outside the home. Realizing the importance of education, Angelina decided to become a teacher.

Over time she became frustrated by the Quaker community's lack of involvement in the contemporary debate on slavery. She began to read more abolitionist literature. Traditional Quakers disapproved of Angelina's insterest in radical abolitionism but she became steadily more involved in the movement. She began to attend anti-slavery meetings and lectures, and joined the newly organised Philadelphia Female Anto-Slavery Society in 1835.

In 1836 Angelina wrote a pamphlet , "An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South," urging Southern women to petition their state legislatures and church officials to end slavery. It was published by the American Anti-Slavery Society. Scholars consider it a high point of Angelina's socio-political agenda.

Read Part Forty HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: ANGELINA GRIMKE WELD P/38

                                                    Read Part One HERE

                  
In this post I continue to focus on a woman named Angelina Grimke Weld. She lived from 1805 - 1879.

Angelina was an active member of the Presbyterian Church. She taught a Sabbath school class and also provided religious services to her family's slaves - a practice her mother initially frowned upon, but later participated in. Angelina became a close friend of the pastor of her church, Rev. William MacDowell. McDowell was a Northener who had previously been the pastor of a Presbyterian church in New Jersey. Angelina and pastor McDowell were both opposed to the institution of slavery, on the grounds that it was a morally deficient system that violated Christian law and human rights. Pastor McDowell advocated patience and prayer over direct action, and argued that abolishing slavery "would create even worse evils." This position was unacceptable to young Angelina.

In 1829 she addressed the issue of slavery at a meeting in her church and said that all members of the congregation should openly condemn the practice. Because she was such an active member of the church community, her audience was respectful when it declined her proposal. By this time the church had come to terms with slavery, finding biblical justification and urging good Christian slaveholders to exercise paternalism and improve the treatment of their slaves. But Angelina lost faith in the values of the Presbyterian Church and in 1829 she was officially expelled.

With her sister Sarah's support, Angelina adopted the tenets of the Quaker faith. The Quaker community was very small in Charleston, and she quickly set out to reform her friends and family. However, given her self-righteous nature, her condescending comments about others tended to offend more than persuade. After deciding that she could not fight slavery while living in the South among white slave owners, she followed her older sister Sarah to Philadelphia. 

Read Part Thirty-Nine HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: ANGELINA GRIMKE WELD P/37

                                                    Read Part One HERE

In this post I focus on a woman named Angelina Grimke Weld. She lived from 1805 - 1879. Angelina was born in Charleston, South Carolina. Her parents were Mary and John Faucheraud Grinke. Her father was a lawyer, planter, politician and judge. Her parents owned a plantation and were major slaveholders. Angelina was the youngest of 14 children. (Her older sister was Sarah). Her father believed women should be subordinate to men and provided education to only his male children, but the boys shared their studies with their sisters.

Young Angelina was very close to her older sister Sarah, who, at the age of 13, persuaded her parents to allow her to be Angelina's godmother. The two sisters maintained an intimate relationship throughout their lives, and lived together for most of their lives, albeit with several short periods of separation.

Even as a child, Angelina was described in family letters and diaries as the most self-righteous, curious and self-assured of all her siblings.

When the time came for her confirmation in the Episcopal Church at the age of 13, Angelina refused to recite the creed of faith. An inquisitive and rebellious girl, she concluded that she could not agree with it and would not complete the confirmation ceremony. Angelina converted to the Presbyterian faith in 1826, aged 21.

Read Part Thirty-Eight HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: SARAH GRIMKE P/36

                                                         Read Part One HERE

 
In this post I continue to focus on a woman named Sarah Grinke. She lived from 1792 -1873.

As Sarah's lectures continued to elicit violent criticism, she became acutely aware of her own oppression as a woman and the overwhelming parallels between the roles of women and slaves in American society. Both groups were denied the vote and the right to a secondary education, and both were treated as second-class citizens.

Then in 1837 Sarah was prompted to write "Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women," the first document to link slavery to the unequal treatment of women. This was a series of letters addressed to Mary Parker, president of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, to defend the right of women to speak in public defense of a moral cause.

Sarah in no way intended to suggest "that the condition of free women can be compared to that of slaves in suffering or degradation," but women faced the same limitations as slaves in education and work opportunity. 

Sarah had been criticized by Theodore Weld, who had married her sister Angelina, for including women's rights into the abolitionist movement. Consequently, she stopped speaking publicly although she remained privately active as an abolitionist and a feminist.

During the Civil War, she and her sister wrote articles supporting the Union and Abraham Lincoln. Following the Civil War, she and her sister and family moved to Boston, Massachusetts where they joined and served as officers of the Massachusetts Women's Suffrage Association.

Sarah died in 1873. 

Read part Thirty-Seven HERE