Rights and Responsibilities of Women

Angelina Grimké applies libertarian ideas to both women and blacks, showing that they are moral agents possessing rights and responsibilities.

Rights and Responsibilities of Women
Angelina Grimké

Angelina Emily Grimké Weld was an American political activist, abolitionist and supporter of the women’s suffrage movement. Born and raised on a large South Carolina plantation, Grimké’s parents were strong advocates of the traditional, upper class Southern values.

At thirteen, Grimké refused confirmation in the Episcopalian Church; at age 21, she converted to the Presbyterian faith. Mutually opposed to the institution of slavery, which they consdered morally deficient and in violation of Christian law and human rights, Grimké and her pastor, Rev. William McDowell, became close friends. Grimké, however, found McDowell’s strategy of patience and prayer unsatisfactory, and, in 1829, she implored all slave-​holding members of her congregation openly condemn the practice. Disillusioned by their polite refusal, Grimké lost faith in the Presbyterian church, and, with her sister’s encouragement, joined the Quaker faith. Discouraged by the attitude of Charleston’s small Quaker community Grimké moved to Philadelphia to live with her sister.

In the fall of 1835, influenced by the work of William Lloyd Garrison, Grimké wrote him a letter stating her concerns and opinions on the issues of abolitionism and mob violence, as well as her personal admiration for Garrison and the values he symbolized. Praising Grimké’s passion, linguistic style and noble ideas, published Grimké’s letter in the next issue of The Liberator. without her consent. The letter, which stirred controversy within Quaker society, who openly condemned any radical activism, established Grimké’s position in abolitionist society.

Grimké was invited to speak at the Massachusetts State Legislature in 1837, and testified February 1838, becoming the first woman in the United States to address a legislative body. That same year, Grimké began to tour the Northeast, giving abolitionist and feminist lectures in churches, despite contemporary notions that women were unfit to express their opinions in the public sphere.

Two of Grimké’s most notable works are Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, in which Grimké attempts to convince Southern women of the moral necessity of ending slavery, and her series of letters to Catharine Beecher, a traditionalist who argued against the participation of women in the abolitionist movement.

The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own. I have found the Anti-​Slavery cause to be the high school of morals in our land—the school in which human rights are more fully investigated, and better understood and taught, than in any other. Here a great fundamental principle is uplifted and illuminated, and from this central light, rays innumerable stream all around. Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men have the same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights. These rights may be wrested from the slave, but they cannot be alienated: his title to himself is as perfect now, as is that of Lyman Beecher: it is stamped on his moral being, and is, like it, imperishable. Now if rights are founded in the nature of our moral being, then the mere circumstance of sex does not give to man higher rights and responsibilities, than to woman. To suppose that it does, would be to deny the self-​evident truth, that the ‘physical constitution is the mere instrument of the moral nature.’ To suppose that it does, would be to break up utterly the relations, of the two natures, and to reverse their functions, exalting the animal nature into a monarch, and humbling the moral into a slave; making the former a proprietor, and the latter its property. When human beings are regarded as moral beings, sex, instead of being enthroned upon the summit, administering upon rights and responsibilities, sinks into insignificance and nothingness. My doctrine then is, that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do. Our duties originate, not from difference of sex, but from the diversity of our relations in life, the various gifts and talents committed to our care, and the different eras in which we live.… I have often been amused at the vain efforts made to define the rights and responsibilities of immortal beings as men and women. No one has yet found out just where the line of separation between them should be drawn, and for this simple reason, that no one knows just how far below man woman is, whether she be a head shorter in her moral responsibilities, or head and shoulders, or the full length of his noble stature, below him, i. e. under his feet. Confusion, uncertainty, and great inconsistencies, must exist on this point, so long as woman is regarded in the least degree inferior to man; but place her where her Maker placed her, on the same high level of human rights with man, side by side with him, and difficulties vanish, the mountains of perplexity flow down at the presence of this grand equalizing principle. Measure her rights and duties by the unerring standard of moral being, not by the false weights and measures of a mere circumstance of her human existence, and then the truth will be self-​evident, that whatever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do. I recognize no rights but human rights—I know nothing of men’s rights and women’s rights for in Christ Jesus, there is neither male nor female.