To give you some context about the primary sources in this week's reading:
Angelina Grimke was born into a slaveholding family in South Carolina. In her teenage years, she moved to Philadelphia to live with her much older sister, Sarah Grimke, who had become a Quaker. Angelina also joined the Quakers, but she left faith when she married a non-Quaker (the abolitionist Theodore Weld) in 1838.
In the early 1830s, as more northern whites became "radical" abolitionists who favored immediate emancipation. In 1834, in Ohio, a group of radical abolitionist seminary students withdrew from Lane Seminary in Cincinnati. The leader of the group was none other than Theodore Weld, Angelina's future husband. The president of Lane Seminary, Lyman Beecher (father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catharine Beecher), was humiliated; his daughter Catharine was infuriated.
Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, Angelina Grimke had achieved some fame for publishing two books: one addressing southern women and the other addressing northern women on the need for ladies to adopt the abolitionist platform. In the mid-1830s, she and her sister two women went on a lecture tour in New York City, and in various towns in New England, and they became notorious. They were the subjects of a "pastoral letter" written by Congregationalist church leaders advising local ministers of the dangers of having women speak in front of mixed-sex audiences.
Since radical abolitionists were frequently accused of having no "family values" (can you guess why?), the presence of these two women on the lecture circuit frustrated some abolitionists who felt that the Grimkes distracted from the primary cause of the movement - ending slavery.
Catharine Beecher had had enough. Frustrated with the Lane Rebels abandonment of her father's school, and seeing the Grimkes' behavior as highly unladylike, she penned a book of letters directed to Angelina Grimke. She had met Angelina once, briefly, in the 1820s. In Beecher's book, she made two points. First she complained about the brutality and unmanliness of "immediate abolitionists" who she felt demonstrated values antithetical to Christianity. Secondly, Beecher pointed out that white women had no place talking about political questions like slavery. Beecher supported gradual emancipation and plans to send freed blacks to Africa.
The response, written by Angelina with her sister Sarah's help and the editorial advice of her now-fiance, Theodore Weld, is your reading this week. You are reading two of the last three letters in which Grimke directly addressed "the woman question," as the woman's rights issue was called in the 19C. The rest of Grimke's book addresses slavery specifically - you can skim through the chapter titles if you want.
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"Nothing but a narrow-minded view of the subjects of human rights and responsibilities can induce anyone to believe in this subordination of a fallible being." In this statement by Grimke she seems to capture the argument paralleling slavery and the subordination of women through marriage. The idea that all people were created equal is insisted upon by Grimke, here in the context of men and women's equality through biblical references. We see in Cott that this explanation was used by both sides in the context of juxtaposing ideas about the equality of slave to the equality of women. By placing marraige in the realm of slavery, women's rights advocates were able to gain sympathy of abolitionists and others who were not committed to the institution of slavery. Conversely, slavery advocates used the tender ideal of a man nurturing and caring for his wife as a means to justify the subordination of slaves. We can see here the importance of marriage in American life and how notions and concepts of marraige became entangled and manipulated into every aspect of society. However, Stanley presents the quest or marraige equality in a slightly more complicated light. Because marriage was so controversial, she contends that women's rights advocates shied away from addressing it as not to polarize potential supporters. Also there was the fear of being associated with "free lovers" forcing women to skirt a thin line between speaking out for equality in marraige and losing supporters to claims of radicalism. Yet once emancipation was achieved, the cause of equality in marraige seemed like a natural progression and women fought against their own enslavement. at the same time, Cott points out freedwomen and men were being encouraged and nearly forced into marraige, thus in a way "re-enslaving" the freedwomen to a new master- their husbands. The analogy of slavery and marraige is an interesting one. Women were indeed in a sense property and although they were perhaps not sold off to the highest bidder on an auction block, class connections and suitable matches provide a logical parallel. Emancipation seems to have helped galvanize the woman's cause in that it forced them to realize that now they were the ones who were enslaved by society, convention, and the men they were supposed to love.
I had never placed the concept of women's rights with slavery even though both movements took place at the same time. Cott presents the arguments of abolitionist who were more outraged by the defamation of marriage through slavery than by the mere fact that people were being treated as property. "'There are no class of people in the United States who so highly appreciate the legality of marriage as those persons who have been held and treated as property.'" Cott quotes Henry Bibb to bring across the point that marriage had become a marker of status. Slaves were not able to have the same legal rights to marriage as free men and women did. A slave was subject to his/her master and had no ability to control their fates. A slave family could and in most cases was, separated and disbanded by a master who wanted to sell his property. However at the time the argument is being made that men are lords of their households, able to do as they please with their wives and children much as they do with their slaves. Women are then being compared to slaves, only difference is the give their 'consent' to marriage. Politicians of the time were quick to note that marriage was vastly different from slavery because women consented to marry, while a slave was either forcefully taken into slavery or born into it. Yet is it fair to say that women were not in some sense slaves to their husbands because once they married the husband had custody over his wife. The wife, like slaves, did not have a right even to herself. Marriage was used by both abolitionist and slaveholders to support their ideals. Both sides manipulated marriage and politicized its meaning and functions to serve their own purposes which worked to a certain extent because marriage is the society on the most personal level. Stanley talks about marriage equality and the struggle it was for women's rights activist to balance their desire for marriage equality and civil liberties without being pegged as radical free lovers. They feared that if their stance was too radical they would lose supporters and turn the public against them. Yet the struggle for equality was pushed forward after emancipation when women realized that men who had once been slaves were now able to be masters of their wives, recreating the master-slave relationship, only this time it was socially constructed and politically reinforced.
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