Sarah Grimke Quotes on Justice
Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) — the South Carolina Quaker abolitionist who with her sister Angelina became the first American women to lecture publicly on antislavery to mixed audiences — gave early American political philosophy one of its principal statements of women’s equal rights in the Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1838). The central argument, developed through close exegetical engagement with the biblical and constitutional sources mobilized by her opponents, is that the sex-based hierarchy that the antebellum United States treated as natural and divinely ordained is in fact a culturally specific arrangement that systematically denies women the equal moral and political standing the founding documents profess. The framework, predating Seneca Falls by a decade, shaped the abolitionist-feminist alliance and the early intellectual self-understanding of American women’s rights.
Quotes
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“I ask no favor for my sex; all I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks.”
Letter 2 (July 17, 1837). -
Attributed to Sarah Grimke:
“The page of history teems with woman's wrongs; it is wet with woman's tears.”
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Attributed to Sarah Grimke:
“Slavery and the subordination of women are the same evil with two faces.”
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“Oh, had I received the education I desired, had I been bred to the profession of the law, I might have been a useful member of society, and instead of myself and my property being taken care of, I might have been a protector of the helpless, a pleader for the poor and unfortunate.”
As quoted in The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina , by Gerda Lerner , ch.5 (1969). -
“I am persuaded that the rights of woman, like the rights of slaves, need only be examined to be understood and asserted.”
Letter 3 (July 1837). -
“I know nothing of man’s rights, or woman’s rights; human rights are all that I recognise.”
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman(1837) | Letter 15 (October 20, 1837). -
“The “cause” was two-fold: abolition of slavery and establishment of women’s rights, especially suffrage. Some abolitionists and feminists thought it essential to win the support of clergymen.”
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman(1837)