In his love letters to Angelina Grimké in 1838, Theodore Dwight Weld did something one would not expect from a man courting a woman: he repeatedly desexed his fiancé in his rhetoric (and at moments ...even imaginatively remade her into a man) by conflating her with a male friend of his, Charles Stuart. Lacking contemporary examples of egalitarian marriages to emulate, the abolitionist couple repeatedly invoked their close homosocial friendships as models for the heterosexual marriage they hoped to build. This essay argues that this surprising feature of the abolitionist couple's courtship letters was a central element of their effort to radically reform marriage and sex. Considering conventional practices of marriage and sex foundational to male power over women in antebellum America, Weld and Grimké saw their personal romance as a site of social engineering where they might redeem both; their courtship was an opportunity to remake marriage into an feminist institution and sex into an egalitarian act they shared and enjoyed as equals. In their love letters, the spiritually minded couple labored to "forget sex" (which for them encompassed by both the inextricably connected categories of gender and sexuality) and see each other only as unsexed souls and not as sexed bodies.
In an interview, author Sue Monk Kidd discusses the writing of her new novel The Invention of Wings. The Invention of Wings begins on Sarah Grimké's 11th birthday in 1803; her father's gift to her is ...her own slave, ten-year-old Hetty (also known as Handful). Grimké was a real historical figure who went on to become an abolistionist and a crusader for women's rights, in large part because of her experiences with her family's slaves. Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees) intertwines fact and fiction as she explores the evolving relationship between Sarah and Handful and the ways the two women come into their own.
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A beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. A girl from a Hasidic Jewish community and ...an African-American boy fight for their forbidden love in Brooklyn.
The work opens and closes with details of queer writer Angelina ("Nana") Weld Grimke, granddaughter of Nancy Weston and Henry Grimke, whose life, like all others in the family, was shaped by race, ...the legacy of slavery, and her link to the Grimke name. ...possibly most important for those scholars reading this book for intersections with recent abolitionist historiography-she describes "the limits of interracial alliances" (p. xxvii). Greenridge casts the Grimke-Weld retreat to New Jersey after their marriage as not just a retreat from active abolitionism but as an abandonment of the Black community and interracial efforts.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
A lively anthology tracing the emergence of the women's-rights movement in the US during the turbulent antebellum period. Sklar (History/SUNY Binghamton) provides a lengthy introductory essay tracing ...with vigor and clarity the manner in which, beginning in the 1830s, white ...
