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
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