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
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