On February 21, 1838 Grimké spoke to the joint special committee of the Massachusetts General Court charged with responding to the large number of anti-slavery petitions that the legislature had received. Its hearing that day took place in the capitol’s largest space, the 500-seat House chamber, to accommodate the huge crowd that attended.
In her remarks (posted below) Grimké called on the legislators to respond to the request of the 20,000 white and black Massachusetts women who had signed the overwhelming majority of the petitions. The signers asked the legislature to demand that the U.S. Congress banish slavery from the District of Columbia, the only part of the nation over which the national legislature possessed undisputed Constitutional control. Success would end slavery in the capital, and thus provide a powerful symbol of progress towards the abolitionists’ larger goal, the end of slavery in all the states. Grimké also spoke of the risks slavery posed to the nation, the greater security that would come from immediate emancipation, the impressive character of free colored people, and the cruelty of race prejudice.
She opened her speech, however, by making the case for her decision to speak. No woman had ever addressed a legislative body, not only because women could not vote or run for office, but also because of the firm societal conviction that women did not belong in what was called “the public sphere.” Indeed, a woman who spoke to a mixed audience gathered for any purpose was considered a seductress, since she was putting her body on display before men. Just a few years before, also in Boston, Maria W. Stewart, a published author, free woman of color, and the first American woman to speak to a mixed audience, faced just such criticisms, and more. In four eloquent speeches she gave in 1832 and 1833, she urged men to sign petitions to end slavery in the District of Columbia and advocated for the liberty and equality for her race and for her right to speak as a woman. She paid a price for her break with tradition. Given the severity of the racist and sexist backlash against her, she felt she had no choice but to cease lecturing thereafter.
In the remarks (again, posted below) which are the only part of Grimké’s speech that survives, she tackled the charge of seductress head on by distancing her unorthodox action from that of another petitioning woman, the famous Biblical figure, Queen Esther of Persia. Grimké’s Bible-reading audience knew that Esther, like the King’s lower status wives, lived in the harem, and served him sexually. It was not her place to request anything of her king. But one day, risking her life, she begged him to save her people, the Babylonian Jews.
Esther was like Grimké in asking a government to save a suffering people but the abolitionist highlighted an important difference. Esther, she said, achieved her goal by exerting her “personal charms” and offering the possibilities of “sensual gratification.” Grimké announced she would use no such methods herself. They were not required, she asserted, in this “enlightened age.” Strategically crediting her audience with an attitude that some of them did not possess, Grimké noted that the use of “sensual means” would be “unworthy of this committee” as well as being – this was her moral point – “beneath the dignity of the cause of humanity.” Thus she deftly deflected the charge of seduction that hovered over her presence on the podium.
Grimké had planned to speak to the committee only once but, after she lectured for several hours, the committee was ready to adjourn. Boldly, she asked for more time another day, which the chair generously granted. In the end, she had so much to say that she addressed the group a total of three times in the course of ten days, in speeches lasting a total of more than six hours.
Her achievement was all the more remarkable given that the 33-year-old Angelina Grimké had only been speaking in public for a little more than a year. Trained by the American Anti-Slavery Society as an abolitionist lecturer and organizer, she had given her first speech, to women only, in December 1836 in New York City. The following summer she had come to Massachusetts with her sister, Sarah Grimké, also an abolitionist lecturer, and for four months she had given four or five lectures a week across the eastern half of the state, at first to audiences of only women, but increasingly to mixed audiences that sometimes numbered in the thousands, and were partially hostile. Word had spread of her gifts as an orator, and many were curious to hear a white Southerner speak of slavery from an abolitionist point of view. Others were pro-slavery and came to heckle. Day after day, Angelina had spoken confidently.
But she was nervous now. Applause greeted her as she entered the hall with Sarah. They wore simple gray dresses and white caps, having converted from the Presbyterian to the Quaker faith some years before. The audience was notably diverse: the benches were filled with women, the aisles and edges of the room with men, and both white and black citizens were present. There were supporters, skeptics, the curious, and the hostile. When Angelina rose to speak, hisses sizzled from the back doorway. She wrote a friend later, “My heart had never quailed before but it almost died within me at that tremendous hour.” The room was rowdy but by speaking loudly she succeeded “in hushing down the noise of the people.”
By the day of her second speech, she was fully in charge. “I spoke with far more freedom,” she reported to her friend. “I felt as if could stand up in the dignity of my moral being and face a frowning world … I was perfectly calm.”
Press coverage was mixed. One hostile paper called her performance “a farce” and another, seeking to undercut her credibility with its white readers, claimed she looked “mulatto,” that is, of mixed race. Another pitied “her delusion” that women had a right to influence public affairs. Only a reform paper praised her without qualification: “It was a noble day when for the first time in civilized America, a Woman stood up in a legislative hall, vindicating the rights of woman.”
The proposal that Grimké address the committee had been made in a jesting spirit by one of her fellow abolitionists, Henry Stanton (future husband of women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton). Obligingly, Angelina had laughed at the thought. But afterwards she decided that, though she “could hardly believe my own feelings,” she “must do it.” A few months earlier she had written another friend, “The time to assert a right is the time when that right is denied.” In this case, she had expected a denial. But, surprisingly, the chair of the committee was open-minded and agreed to her proposal.
Ultimately the committee decided the time was not yet right for the state legislature to ask Congress to end slavery in the District of Columbia. But Grimké knew she had accomplished something significant. “Such proceedings cannot but have an important bearing on the Woman Question,” she wrote another friend. “We Abolitionist Women are turning the world upside down,” adding, “I am sorely tempted to believe I have had a triumph.” We would have to agree.
When historians of the 1960s rediscovered the forgotten history of the U.S. women’s rights movement, they dated its origins to 1848, when the first women’s rights convention was held and the Declaration of Sentiments was signed. Since then, as more research has been done, the beginning date has become less certain. Some historians argue the movement began in Boston in 1832 when Maria W. Stewart became the first American woman to speak in public regarding political questions and endorse women’s engagement. Another important year was 1837, when abolitionist women met in a national convention for the first time and adopted several women’s rights resolutions that the Grimké sisters had penned. It was also the year that Catharine Beecher publicly criticized the sisters for encouraging women to petition their governments and that Angelina Grimké rebutted her in print by asserting women’s right to be political; weeks later, Sarah Grimké challenged the criticisms the sisters received with her defiant Letters on the Equality of the Sexes. These events set the stage for what happened in Boston in 1838, when the eloquent and bold Angelina Grimké stood before legislators to make the case that women belonged in the political world.
In her remarks (posted below) Grimké called on the legislators to respond to the request of the 20,000 white and black Massachusetts women who had signed the overwhelming majority of the petitions. The signers asked the legislature to demand that the U.S. Congress banish slavery from the District of Columbia, the only part of the nation over which the national legislature possessed undisputed Constitutional control. Success would end slavery in the capital, and thus provide a powerful symbol of progress towards the abolitionists’ larger goal, the end of slavery in all the states. Grimké also spoke of the risks slavery posed to the nation, the greater security that would come from immediate emancipation, the impressive character of free colored people, and the cruelty of race prejudice.
She opened her speech, however, by making the case for her decision to speak. No woman had ever addressed a legislative body, not only because women could not vote or run for office, but also because of the firm societal conviction that women did not belong in what was called “the public sphere.” Indeed, a woman who spoke to a mixed audience gathered for any purpose was considered a seductress, since she was putting her body on display before men. Just a few years before, also in Boston, Maria W. Stewart, a published author, free woman of color, and the first American woman to speak to a mixed audience, faced just such criticisms, and more. In four eloquent speeches she gave in 1832 and 1833, she urged men to sign petitions to end slavery in the District of Columbia and advocated for the liberty and equality for her race and for her right to speak as a woman. She paid a price for her break with tradition. Given the severity of the racist and sexist backlash against her, she felt she had no choice but to cease lecturing thereafter.
In the remarks (again, posted below) which are the only part of Grimké’s speech that survives, she tackled the charge of seductress head on by distancing her unorthodox action from that of another petitioning woman, the famous Biblical figure, Queen Esther of Persia. Grimké’s Bible-reading audience knew that Esther, like the King’s lower status wives, lived in the harem, and served him sexually. It was not her place to request anything of her king. But one day, risking her life, she begged him to save her people, the Babylonian Jews.
Esther was like Grimké in asking a government to save a suffering people but the abolitionist highlighted an important difference. Esther, she said, achieved her goal by exerting her “personal charms” and offering the possibilities of “sensual gratification.” Grimké announced she would use no such methods herself. They were not required, she asserted, in this “enlightened age.” Strategically crediting her audience with an attitude that some of them did not possess, Grimké noted that the use of “sensual means” would be “unworthy of this committee” as well as being – this was her moral point – “beneath the dignity of the cause of humanity.” Thus she deftly deflected the charge of seduction that hovered over her presence on the podium.
Grimké had planned to speak to the committee only once but, after she lectured for several hours, the committee was ready to adjourn. Boldly, she asked for more time another day, which the chair generously granted. In the end, she had so much to say that she addressed the group a total of three times in the course of ten days, in speeches lasting a total of more than six hours.
Her achievement was all the more remarkable given that the 33-year-old Angelina Grimké had only been speaking in public for a little more than a year. Trained by the American Anti-Slavery Society as an abolitionist lecturer and organizer, she had given her first speech, to women only, in December 1836 in New York City. The following summer she had come to Massachusetts with her sister, Sarah Grimké, also an abolitionist lecturer, and for four months she had given four or five lectures a week across the eastern half of the state, at first to audiences of only women, but increasingly to mixed audiences that sometimes numbered in the thousands, and were partially hostile. Word had spread of her gifts as an orator, and many were curious to hear a white Southerner speak of slavery from an abolitionist point of view. Others were pro-slavery and came to heckle. Day after day, Angelina had spoken confidently.
But she was nervous now. Applause greeted her as she entered the hall with Sarah. They wore simple gray dresses and white caps, having converted from the Presbyterian to the Quaker faith some years before. The audience was notably diverse: the benches were filled with women, the aisles and edges of the room with men, and both white and black citizens were present. There were supporters, skeptics, the curious, and the hostile. When Angelina rose to speak, hisses sizzled from the back doorway. She wrote a friend later, “My heart had never quailed before but it almost died within me at that tremendous hour.” The room was rowdy but by speaking loudly she succeeded “in hushing down the noise of the people.”
By the day of her second speech, she was fully in charge. “I spoke with far more freedom,” she reported to her friend. “I felt as if could stand up in the dignity of my moral being and face a frowning world … I was perfectly calm.”
Press coverage was mixed. One hostile paper called her performance “a farce” and another, seeking to undercut her credibility with its white readers, claimed she looked “mulatto,” that is, of mixed race. Another pitied “her delusion” that women had a right to influence public affairs. Only a reform paper praised her without qualification: “It was a noble day when for the first time in civilized America, a Woman stood up in a legislative hall, vindicating the rights of woman.”
The proposal that Grimké address the committee had been made in a jesting spirit by one of her fellow abolitionists, Henry Stanton (future husband of women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton). Obligingly, Angelina had laughed at the thought. But afterwards she decided that, though she “could hardly believe my own feelings,” she “must do it.” A few months earlier she had written another friend, “The time to assert a right is the time when that right is denied.” In this case, she had expected a denial. But, surprisingly, the chair of the committee was open-minded and agreed to her proposal.
Ultimately the committee decided the time was not yet right for the state legislature to ask Congress to end slavery in the District of Columbia. But Grimké knew she had accomplished something significant. “Such proceedings cannot but have an important bearing on the Woman Question,” she wrote another friend. “We Abolitionist Women are turning the world upside down,” adding, “I am sorely tempted to believe I have had a triumph.” We would have to agree.
When historians of the 1960s rediscovered the forgotten history of the U.S. women’s rights movement, they dated its origins to 1848, when the first women’s rights convention was held and the Declaration of Sentiments was signed. Since then, as more research has been done, the beginning date has become less certain. Some historians argue the movement began in Boston in 1832 when Maria W. Stewart became the first American woman to speak in public regarding political questions and endorse women’s engagement. Another important year was 1837, when abolitionist women met in a national convention for the first time and adopted several women’s rights resolutions that the Grimké sisters had penned. It was also the year that Catharine Beecher publicly criticized the sisters for encouraging women to petition their governments and that Angelina Grimké rebutted her in print by asserting women’s right to be political; weeks later, Sarah Grimké challenged the criticisms the sisters received with her defiant Letters on the Equality of the Sexes. These events set the stage for what happened in Boston in 1838, when the eloquent and bold Angelina Grimké stood before legislators to make the case that women belonged in the political world.
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