IN SHORT; NONFICTION Bancroft, Catherine
New York Times Book Review,
05/1988
Book Review
LETTERS ON THE EQUALITY OF THE SEXES AND OTHER ESSAYS. By Sarah Grimke. Edited by Elizabeth Ann Bartlett. (Yale University, $21.50.) ''Woman by surrendering herself to the tutelage of man may in many ...cases live at her ease, but she will live the life of a slave.'' It was in speaking for the rights of the slave that Sarah Grimke first won notoriety, and it was the experience of being censured as a public-speaking woman that prompted her to draft ''Letters on the Equality of the Sexes'' (1838), a pioneering document in American feminism.
... yet it is difficult to avoid some disappointment upon encountering the tepid conclusion that "sexual identity, personal aspiration, social status, gender and racial consciousness, and ...temperamental characteristics often collectively help to determine the spiritual journeys of its subjects" (189); or that all nine individuals under consideration, at some point in their lives, originally found something appealing in the evangelical tradition (190). (This latter insight seems built into the book's design, after all; in order to be disenchanted, one has to have been enchanted.) All this is to say that Hempton has inaugurated a new line of inquiry that promises enormous payoffs in the study of evangelicalism and, indeed, the changing nature of belief (and unbelief) itself.
This study consists of brief biographical portraits of nine diverse individuals whose attraction to and disenchantment with Evangelicalism provides a distinctive lens through which to view more ...widely and deeply the nature of Evangelical religion. In the hands of a less skilled historian, such an approach might well prove fatal.
Perry, Mark. Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimke Family's Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders. Nov. 2001. 392p. index. Viking, $27.95 (0-670-03011-2). 973 5
