Sarah Grimke 1792 – 1873

Sarah Moore Grimke was an American abolitionist, philosopher, and one of the founding figures of nineteenth-century American feminist thought, the elder sister of Angelina Grimke and a Quaker convert from a slaveholding South Carolina family. Her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman of 1838, addressed in form to Mary S. Parker, mounted one of the earliest sustained American philosophical arguments for the moral and intellectual equality of women, on the basis of a careful Christian and rationalist reading of Scripture. With her sister she became one of the first American women to lecture publicly to mixed audiences and a model for the nineteenth-century women's rights movement.

Sarah Moore Grimké was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in November 1792, the sixth of fourteen children of a slaveholding judge. She was largely self-taught, learning Latin, French, and law from her father's library, and from childhood was unable to reconcile her Anglican Christianity with the slavery she saw on the family estate. After several long visits to Philadelphia she settled there in 1821, joined the Society of Friends, and in the 1830s, with her younger sister Angelina, became a celebrated abolitionist lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society, addressing — to the horror of contemporary clergy — audiences of mixed sex.

Her major writings are An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States (1836), the Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1838), and her share in American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839, edited with her husband Theodore Dwight Weld and her sister Angelina), which became a principal source of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, occasioned by a pastoral letter denouncing the Grimkés' public lecturing as 'unnatural', argued that the spiritual and moral equality of women required a corresponding equality in education, work, and public life and were the first sustained American statement of the case for women's rights. Grimké lived in retirement with the Welds in Belleville, New Jersey, and at Hyde Park, Massachusetts, where she died in December 1873.