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 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.
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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