Grimké Sisters: Abolitionists and Women's Rights Pioneers

Key facts

• Sarah Moore Grimké lived 1792-1873.
• Angelina Grimké Weld lived 1805-1879.
• They were born in Charleston, South Carolina.
• Their father John Faucheraud Grimké was a state supreme court judge.
• Their mother Mary Smith oversaw the plantation.
• At age eleven, Sarah was given an enslaved girl named Hetty.
• Sarah moved to Philadelphia in 1821 to join Quakers.
• They joined the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1835.
• Angelina wrote to William Lloyd Garrison in 1835; he published her letter in The Liberator.
• Angelina published An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South in 1836.
• Sarah published Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States in 1836.
• Angelina published Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States in 1837.
• Sarah published Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women in 1838.
• They were the first female agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
• They were the first women to speak before a state legislature.
• Angelina married Theodore Weld in 1838.
• The building where Angelina spoke after marriage was burned by a mob.
• They published American Slavery As It Is in 1839.
• By 1851, they directed a boarding school and later opened a second school in New Jersey.
• Sarah wrote to President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.
• They supported their nephews' education; one attended Harvard Law, the other Princeton Theological Seminary.
• Sarah became vice president of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association in 1868.
• In 1870, they attempted to vote illegally.