Grimké Sisters Women's Issues (Ready Reference series)

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Daughters of wealthy slaveholders, the Grimké sisters attended fashionable schools but taught themselves forbidden subjects such as Latin and law. Sarah became a Quaker minister, advocating both women’s rights and abolition in Epistle to the Clergy of the South States (1836). Angelina’s pamphlet, Appeal to Christian Women of the South (1836), urged women to protest slavery. Working for the New York Anti- Slavery Society, the Grimkés were the first American women to address mixed audiences publicly. Angelina Grimké published Letters to Catherine E. Beecher (1838), arguing that the division of labor between men and women was inequitable.