This text is part of:
“
[134]
E. Grimke,” 1 the beginning of the woman's rights agitation in America.
The equality of the sexes in Christian duty had, indeed, been implied and asserted by the female anti-slavery organizations, particularly by the Boston2 Society, against those who charged them with quitting their sphere.
It was now, however, to become a burning and dividing question for the abolitionists themselves as well as for the country at large.
The Pastoral Letter, as it may still be read in the ‘Refuge of Oppression’ of the Liberator of August 11,3 1837, asserts, without naming either slavery or ‘Carolina's high-souled daughters,’ that ‘the perplexed and agitating subjects which are now common amongst us . . . should not be forced upon any church as matters for debate, at the hazard of alienation and division.’
There is, it continues, a perceptible loss of deference to the pastoral office; a ‘zeal to violate the principles and rules of Christian intercourse, to interfere with the proper pastoral influence, and to make the church, into ’
1 Angelina Grimkeas able and admirable reply to Miss Beecher was published in thirteen successive letters in the Liberator (7.102, 106, 111, 119, 122, 126, 130, 139, 147, 155, 159, 167, 179), and afterwards in pamphlet form. The eleventh is mainly concerned with the ‘woman question.’ Sarah Grimke continued the discussion in a series of letters, on the province of woman, addressed to Mary S. Parker, and intended for publication in the New England Spectator (Lib. 8.4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28). In a letter to H. C. Wright, from Groton, Mass., Aug. 12, 1837, Sarah says: ‘The Lord . . . has very unexpectedly made us the means of bringing up the discussion of the question of woman's preaching, and all we have to do is to do our duty. . . . I cannot consent to make my Quakerism an excuse for my exercising the rights and performing the duties of a rational and responsible being. . . . All I claim is as woman, and for any woman whom God qualifies and commands to preach his blessed gospel. I claim the Bible, not Quakerism, as my sanction, and I wish this fully understood. . . . Brother Amos A. Phelps wrote us a long, kind, admonitory letter, recommending our desisting from our present course, and confining our labors to our own sex; proposing several plans by which this might be effected, or the responsibility of holding public meetings for men and women not rest on us; but we wrote him word that we could not consent to adopt any other course than that which seemed clearly to be our duty, and advised him to examine the subject, and not identify himself with the authors of the Pastoral Letter.’ On Aug. 27, she writes to the same that, after a personal interview, Phelps had given up the idea of publishing a protest against the sisters. For the correspondence between them, see Lib. 11: [34].
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.