Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

and scorn, so here, too in profound deference to the South, we

refuse to eat, or ride, or walk, or associate, or open our institutions of learning, or even our zoological institutions to people of color, unless they visit them in the capacity of servants, of menials

in humble attendance upon the Anglo-American. Who ever heard

of a more wicked absurdity in a Republican country?

Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man’s

wrongs, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education. 12

In 1837, public reaction against the Grimke sisters became

fierce. The Massachusetts clergy published a pastoral letter

denouncing female activism:

We invite your attention to the dangers which at present seem

to threaten the female character with wide-spread and permanent

injury.

. . . We cannot. . . but regret the mistaken conduct of those

who encourage females to bear an obtrusive and ostentatious part

in measures of reform, and [we cannot] countenance any of that

sex who so far forget themselves as to itinerate in the character

of public lecturers and teachers. We especially deplore the intimate acquaintance and promiscuous conversation of females with regard to things which ought not to be named; by which

that modesty and delicacy which is the charm of domestic life,

and which constitutes the true influence of woman in society, is

consumed, and the way opened, as we apprehend, for degeneracy

and ruin. 13

Replying to the pastoral letter, Angelina wrote: “We are

placed very unexpectedly in a very trying situation, in the forefront of an entirely new contest— a contest for the rights of woman as a moral, intelligent and responsible being. ”14 Sarah’s reply, which was later published as part of a systematic analysis of women’s oppression called Letters on the Equality

of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, read in part as

follows:

[The pastoral letter] says, “We invite your attention to the dangers which at present seem to threaten the f e m a l e c h a r a c t e r with wide-spread and permanent injury. ” I rejoice that they have

called the attention of my sex to this subject, because I believe if

woman investigates it, she will soon discover that danger is impending, though from a totally different source. . . danger from those who, having long held the reins of usurped authority,

are unwilling to permit us to fill that sphere which God created

us to move in, and who have entered into league to crush the

immortal mind of woman. I rejoice, because I am persuaded that

the rights of woman, like the rights of slaves, need only be examined to be understood and asserted, even by some of those who are now endeavoring to smother the irrepressible desire for

mental and spiritual freedom which glows in the breast of many,

who hardly dare to speak their sentiments. 15

In this confrontation with the Massachusetts clergy, the

women’s rights movement was bom in the United States. Two

women, speaking for all the oppressed of their kind, resolved

to transform society in the name of, and for the sake of,

women. The work of Angelina and Sarah Grimke, so profound in its political analysis of tyranny, so visionary in its revolutionary urgency, so unyielding in its hatred of human

bondage, so radical in its perception of the common oppression of all women and black men, was the fiber from which the cloth of the first feminist movement was woven. Elizabeth

Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone