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