Women's Rights Emerges Within the Antislavery Movement

THE BEDFORD SERIES IN HISTORY AND CULTURE Women's Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 A Brief History with Documents Related Titles in TilE BEDFORD SERIES IN HISTORY AND CULTURE Advisory Editors: Natalie Zemon Davis, Princeton University Ernest R. May, Harvard University judith Sargent Murray: A Brief Biography with Documents Sheila L. Skemp, University ofMississippi Narrative of the Life ofFrederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself Edited with an Introduction by David W. Blight, Amherst College Margaret Fuller: A Brief Biography with Documents Eve Kornfeld, San Diego State University William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight against Slavery: Selections from ThE LIBERATOR Edited with an Introduction by William E. Cain, Wellesley College Defending the Cornerstone: Proslavery Arguments in the American South (forthcoming) Paul Finkelman, University ofTulsa College ofLaw Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents Paul Finkelman, University of Tulsa College ofLaw Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War: Selected Writings and Speeches (forthcoming) Michael P. Johnson, johns Hopkins University African American Perspectives on the Civil War and Reconstruction (forthcoming) Michael P. Johnson, johns Hopkins University Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900 Edited with an Introduction by Jacqueline Jones Royster, The Ohio State University THE BEDFORD SERIES IN HISTORY AND CULTURE Women's Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 A Brief History with Documents Kathryn Kish Sklar State University ofNew Thrk, Binghamton PALGRAVE MACMILLAN For Bedford/St. Martins Executive Editor for History and Political Science: Katherine E. Kurzman Developmental Editor: Louise Townsend Editorial Assistant: Chip Turner Senior Production Supervisor: Dennis Conroy Marketing Manager: Charles Cavaliere Project Management: Books By Design, Inc. Text Design: Claire Seng-Niemoeller Indexer: Kathleen Babbitt Cover Design: Richard Emery Design, Inc. Cover Art: Am I Not a Woman and a Sister? Logo for the Ladies Department of The Liberator. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Composition: G&S Typesetters, Inc. Printing and Binding: Haddon Craftsmen, an R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company President: Charles H. Christensen Editorial Director: Joan E. Feinberg Director ofMarketing: Karen R. Melton Director ofEditing, Design, and Production: Marcia Cohen Manager, Publishing Services: Emily Berleth Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-63693 Copyright © 2000 by Bedford/St Martin's Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2000 978-0-312-22819-4 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, record ing, or otherwise, except as may be expressly permitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by the Publisher. Manufactured in the United States of America. 5 4 3 2 1 0 f e d c b a For information, write: Bedford/St Martin's, 75 Arlington Street, Boston, MA 02116 (617-399-4000) ISBN 978-0-312-10144-2 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-349-62638-0 ISBN 978-1-137-04527-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-04527-0 TO MY DAUGHTERS Susan Sklar Friedman Amy Luers Sascha Dublin Sonya Dublin Wondrous new progenitors of women's rights This page intentionally left blank Foreword The Bedford Series in History and Culture is designed so that readers can study the past as historians do. The historian's first task is finding the evidence. Documents, letters, memoirs, interviews, pictures, movies, novels, or poems can provide facts and clues. Then the historian questions and compares the sources. There is more to do than in a courtroom, for hearsay evidence is wel come, and the historian is usually looking for answers beyond act and motive. Different views of an event may be as important as a single ver dict. How a story is told may yield as much information as what it says. Along the way the historian seeks help from other historians and per haps from specialists in other disciplines. Finally, it is time to write, to decide on an interpretation and how to arrange the evidence for readers. Each book in this series contains an important historical document or group of documents, each document a witness from the past and open to interpretation in different ways. The documents are combined with some element of historical narrative- an introduction or a biographical essay, for example -that provides students with an analysis of the pri mary source material and important background information about the world in which it was produced. Each book in the series focuses on a specific topic within a specific historical period. Each provides a basis for lively thought and discus sion about several aspects of the topic and the historian's role. Each is short enough (and inexpensive enough) to be a reasonable one-week assignment in a college course. Whether as classroom or personal read ing, each book in the series provides firsthand experience of the chal lenge- and fun- of discovering, recreating, and interpreting the past. Natalie Zemon Davis Ernest R. May vii "I am persuaded that woman is not to be as she has been, a mere second-hand agent in the regeneration of a fallen world, but the acknowledged equal and co-worker with man in this glorious work." ANGELINA GRIMKE in a letter written from Groton, Mass., August 10, 1837 Preface The first women's rights movement in the United States, which began in the 1830s, emerged from the campaign to end slavery. As active partici pants in the effort to abolish slavery, white women and free black women mobilized their communities, created local organizations, and provided crucial financial support to the national antislavery association. These ef forts were so successful that women became unwilling to abide by the rules that limited their participation in public life. In defending them selves against critics who deplored their departure from "woman's as signed sphere," they launched a women's rights agenda that resonates to the present day. The chief actors in this dramatic story were Angelina and Sarah Grimke, daughters of a prominent slaveholding family in Charleston, South Carolina. Their migration out of the South and their recruitment into the most radical form of antislavery protest set the stage for their in novations on behalf of women's rights. In the process of breaking down the barriers of opinion that prohibited women from speaking in public, they created a platform of women's rights that insisted "whatever is morally right for a man to do is morally right for a woman to do." This book focuses on the process by which the Grimke sisters and their supporters transformed the definition of acceptable behavior for women in public life in the United States. It gathers selections from their letters and writings as well as from others who illuminate the context within which they acted in the 1830s. The book also considers how an independent women's rights movement came into being in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Using the Grimkes' legacy andre sponding to changes in American society and culture, that movement re veals a great deal about American life in the decades before and the years immediately after the Civil War. Taking a fresh look at the documents associated with these remark able events, this book offers a fresh interpretation of them- one that ix X PREFACE emphasizes the religious context of the Grimkes' protest and their com mitment to racial equality as well as gender equality. Also new is the book's account of how the women's rights movement was transplanted into more secular soil after 1840. I have chosen documents that reveal the subjective experience of the early supporters of women's rights. For them women's rights was more than an ideology. It reflected their immediate experience, both public and private. This subjectivity was an important basis for the Grimkes' innovations, and it became a major reason for the movement's rapid growth after 1840. This selection of documents also shows how questions about race and racial prejudice shaped the women's rights movement from the mo ment of its birth in 1837 to its institutionalization within the first national women's suffrage associations in 1869. This book is a study in the history of race as well as the history of gender. These documents were also chosen with an eye to illuminating the dy namic impact of the antislavery movement on American society in the 1830s. Of incalculable significance in U.S. history, the abolitionist move ment remains one of the great reservoirs of civil morality in American political culture. I also selected documents that help us understand how civil soci ety-that is, groups active outside the institutions of government were changing during a crucial period of American history. The culture of public life is a crucial ingredient in any society, never more so than on the eve of the American Civil War. The rapidly changing place of women within that culture provides a wide window for viewing public life. Because social movements are deeply embedded in the culture that produces them, to understand them we must explore their cultural con texts. This book examines the cultural environment of the antebellum women's rights movement by looking at the way that public culture was constructed with values drawn from ideologies about gender, race, reli gion, region, and family life. These documents also invite us to witness how history has been shaped by the contingent, the unexpected, and the unlikely. No general laws could have forecast the events depicted in these pages. There is a love story here-but even it has an unpredictable outcome. ACKNOWlEDGMENTS All historians, especially those who edit primary sources, are indebted to archivists who aid in their quest for the perfect document.

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