Grimké, Sarah Moore

Life Span
to
    Full name
    Sarah Moore Grimké
    Place of Birth
    Burial Place
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Female
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Slave State
    Family
    John Faucheraud Grimké (father), Mary Smith (mother), Angelina Emily Grimké (sister), Theodore Dwight Weld (brother-in-law)
    Occupation
    Educator
    Writer or Artist
    Other Affiliations
    Abolitionists (Anti-Slavery Society)
    Women’s Rights

    Sarah Moore Grimké (American National Biography)

    Scholarship
    [Sarah] Grimké's contribution to antislavery agitation was pivotal, not only because of her considerable talent as a writer, speaker, teacher, and pamphleteer, but also because of her sex, southern nativity, and uncommon courage. As leaders of the female antislavery movement, Sarah and Angelina regularly risked physical harm and slander. They were the only women to brave social custom and charges of "heresy" in the 1837 speaking tour of New England; with Abigail Kelley, Frances Wright, Maria Stewart, and several others, Sarah made it possible for later generations of women to occupy public spaces without fear (as happened on one occasion) of having to run a gauntlet of jeering men and boys. Sarah's elegant mapping of similarities (and, occasionally, of differences) between white women in America and African-American slaves--and especially her insistence that white women learn to empathize more completely with black women--elevated her to the first rank of social reformers and Christian-feminist theoreticians. As historian Larry Ceplair put it, Sarah Grimké and her devoted sister were genuine "revolutionaries" in a land not given to revolutionary change, "increasingly conscious that they were blazing a public path for women of courage who had seen a light or heard a voice of truth" (Ceplair, p. xi).
    Mary Jo Miles, "Grimké, Sarah Moore," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00294.html.
    Chicago Style Entry Link
    Grimké, Sarah Moore. An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States. New York, 1836. view record
    Perry, Mark. Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimké Family's Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders. New York: Viking, 2001. view record
    How to Cite This Page: "Grimké, Sarah Moore," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/index.php/node/12733.