A collection of the essays, documents and letters of Sarah Grimke, who together with her sister Angelina was one of the leading figures in the abolitionist and early feminist movements in the USA. ...Lerner provides a commentary on the pieces and asserts the importance of Grimke as feminist theorist.
En quoi l’histoire des sœurs Grimké peut-elle intéresser le lecteur français contemporain, non spécialiste de l’histoire américaine du XIXe siècle ? Retiendra-t-il d’elles des figures de ...l’antiesclavagisme radical ou des personnalités féministes avant-gardistes ? Une cartographie de l’histoire des deux soeurs, des lieux d’élection et des lieux de reniement illustre leur itinéraire, du Sud le plus traditionaliste à la Nouvelle-Angleterre, terroir du radicalisme réformiste, ainsi que la gestation de leur révolte personnelle, la formation de leurs prises de position et leur émancipation tant sociale que religieuse et intellectuelle. Plus que leur participation militante au débat public contre l’esclavage, leurs écrits, jamais encore traduits en français, éclairent ce parcours qui, tout en s’appuyant sur la cause de l’antiesclavagisme, développe un argumentaire féministe exemplaire dont le progressisme reste inégalé encore aujourd’hui.
A landmark work of women's history originally published in 1967, Gerda Lerner's best-selling biography of Sarah and Angelina Grimke explores the lives and ideas of the only southern women to become ...antislavery agents in the North and pioneers for women's rights. This revised and expanded edition includes two new primary documents and an additional essay by Lerner. In a revised introduction Lerner reinterprets her own work nearly forty years later and gives new recognition to the major significance of Sarah Grimke's feminist writings.
April Haynes tracks the changes in nineteenth-century discourses on normative female sexuality and sexual health to the juncture of abolitionism, moral reform, and the growing popular interest in ...physiology.Haynes argues that warnings to women about the solitary vice gave a small group of African American abolitionist women from New York's African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church their opportunity to undermine the racial opposition of white female sexual purity and black female wantonness.In the hands of market-driven lecturers like the British-born Frederick Hollick (whom readers might recall as the entrepreneurial advocate of female pleasure in Michael Sappol's A Traffic of Dead Bodies) and conservative white female moral reformers, however, the emphasis on virtue-an internal quality supported by sexual knowledge and manifested in self-government-gave way by the 1840s and 1850s to a focus on purity, a reputedly racial condition marked by anatomical difference, according to Hollick, and vulnerable to external circumstances like coercion.
Studying texts by Lydia Maria Child, Sarah Grimke, and Margaret Fuller, this article seeks to recover the early phases of a dialogue that moved marriage away from an institution grounded in ideas of ...unification and toward a concept of marriage grounded in liberal ideas about equality. It seeks to situate the “marriage question” within both the rhetoric of American antebellum reform and of liberal religious thought. Rather than concluding that these early texts facilitated a movement toward a contractarian ideal of marriage this article concludes that Child, Grimke, and Fuller, sought to discredit unification as an organizing idea for marriage and replace it with a definition that placed a spiritual commitment to equality between the partners as the animating core of the idea of marriage.
... the extraordinary repurposing, reuse, and, most important, reconceptualizing of media represented by American Slavery As It Is entailed a complex negotiation between modes of access to media, ...expertise, and the imagination and vision to understand that southern newspapers could not only be made to speak against themselves, but also be picked through, tagged, and sorted to create a new mode of understanding information. Like present-day academic researchers who pick through databases for particular uses of words, for authors' names, or for fragments of poetry to place them into new contexts that will yield new interpretative possibilities, Angelina and Sarah Grimké and Theodore Weld reconceived of ads and articles in proslavery papers as items that could be broken free of their surroundings and aggregated, strung along a different thread to yield a damning portrait of slavery written in the slaveholders' own words.
In Philadelphia, where the nation was founded, vegetarianism as a movement in America also began, and indeed much of the subsequent work to help animals was carried out by people living in Philly- ...many of them working for justice in other areas that they saw as overlapping ethical concerns. Here's a look at how social justice was pushed forward by a virtual parade of meatless advocates in the Delaware Valley prior to the Civil War. Together with one of his British admirers, Alcott founded a proto-vegan commune called Fruitlands, where not only animal foods were banned, but all work animals, leather shoes, wool clothing, cotton cloth (a slave-labor product), and manure fertilizer. For several years, this periodical was ground zero for Americans looking for and sharing information, often in the form of letters about vegetarian eating, including some who explicitly advocated abstaining from all animal products.
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