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Sarah Grimké Quotes

Sarah Moore Grimké was an American abolitionist, writer, and member of the women's suffrage movement. Born and reared in South Carolina to a prominent, wealthy planter family, she moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the 1820s where she became a Quaker. Her younger sister Angelina Grimké joined her there and they both became active in the abolition movement. The sisters began to speak on the abolitionist lecture circuit, among a tradition of women who had been speaking in public on political issues since colonial days, including Susanna Wright, Hannah Griffitts, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Anna Dickinson. They recounted their knowledge of slavery firsthand, urged abolition, and also became lawyers for women's rights. Wikipedia  

✵ 26. November 1792 – 23. December 1873
Sarah Grimké photo
Sarah Grimké: 22 quotes1 like

Famous Sarah Grimké Quotes

“I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.”

Sarah Grimké

Letter 2 (July 17, 1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

“Thus far woman has struggled through life with bandaged eyes, accepting the dogma of her weakness and inability to take care of herself not only physically but intellectually. She has held out a trembling hand and received gratefully the proffered aid. She has foregone her right to study, to know the laws and purposes of government to which she is subject. But there is now awakened in her a consciousness that she is defrauded of her legitimate Rights and that she never can fulfill her mission until she is placed in that position to which she feels herself called by the divinity within. Hitherto she has surrendered her person and her individuality to man, but she can no longer do this and not feel that she is outraging her nature and her God.”

Sarah Grimké

Written in 1857, as quoted in ch. 87.
The Female Experience (1977)

“I am persuaded that the rights of woman, like the rights of slaves, need only be examined to be understood and asserted.”

Sarah Grimké

Letter 3 (July 1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

“[Girls] study under the paralyzing idea that their acquirements cannot be brought into practical use. They may subserve the purposes of promoting individual domestic pleasure and social enjoyment in conversation, but what are they in comparison with the grand stimulation of independence and self- reliance, of the capability of contributing to the comfort and happiness of those whom they love as their own souls?”

Sarah Grimké

Written in 1852, as quoted in ch. 87.
The Female Experience (1977)

“I want my sex to claim nothing from their brethren but what their brethren may justly claim from them.”

Sarah Grimké

Opposing unreciprocated acts of chivalry and deference toward women.
Letter 15 (October 20, 1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

“I know nothing of man’s rights, or woman’s rights; human rights are all that I recognise.”

Sarah Grimké

Letter 15 (October 20, 1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

Sarah Grimké Quotes about women

“Fashionable women regard themselves, and are regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure; and the vacuity of mind, the heartlessness, the frivolity which is the necessary result of this false and debasing estimate of women, can only be fully understood by those who have mingled in the folly and wickedness of fashionable life.”

Sarah Grimké

Letter 8 (1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

“One of the duties which devolve upon women in the present interesting crisis, is to prepare themselves for more extensive usefulness, by making use of those religious and literary privileges and advantages that are within their reach, if they will only stretch out their hands and possess them.”

Sarah Grimké

Letter 15 (October 20, 1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

“If the minds of women were enlightened and improved, the domestic circle would be more frequently refreshed by intelligent conversation, a means of edification now deplorably neglected, for want of that cultivation which these intellectual advantages would confer.”

Sarah Grimké

Letter 15 (October 20, 1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

“Intellect is not sexed;… strength of mind is not sexed; and … our views about the duties of men and the duties of women, the sphere of man and the sphere of woman, are mere arbitrary opinions, differing in different ages and countries, and dependent solely on the will and judgment of erring mortals.”

Sarah Grimké

Letter 9 (August 25, 1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

“The virtue of female slaves is wholly at the mercy of irresponsible tyrants, and women are bought and sold in our slave markets, to gratify the brutal lust of those who bear the name of Christians.”

Sarah Grimké

Letter 8.
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

“The reason why women effect so little and are so shallow is because their aims are low, marriage is the prize for which they strive; if foiled in that they rarely rise above disappointment.”

Sarah Grimké

Written in 1852, as quoted in ch. 87.
The Female Experience (1977)

Sarah Grimké Quotes

“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”

Sarah Grimké

Letter 2 (July 17, 1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

“There has been a comparatively greater proportion of good queens, than of good kings.”

Sarah Grimké

Letter 9 (August 25, 1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

“If the sewing societies, the avails of whose industry are now expended in supporting and educating young men for the ministry, were to withdraw their contributions to these objects, and give them where they are more needed, to their advancement of their own sex in useful learning, the next generation might furnish sufficient proof, that in intelligence and ability to master the whole circle of sciences, woman is not inferior to man.”

Sarah Grimké

Letter 15 (October 20, 1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

“Oh, had I received the education I desired, had I been bred to the profession of the law, I might have been a useful member of society, and instead of myself and my property being taken care of, I might have been a protector of the helpless, a pleader for the poor and unfortunate.”

Sarah Grimké

As quoted in The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina, by Gerda Lerner, ch.5 (1969).

“Many a woman shudders … at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians.”

Sarah Grimké

Written in 1852, as quoted in ch. 87.
The Female Experience (1977)

“Had Adam tenderly reproved his wife, and endeavored to lead her to repentance instead of sharing in her guilt, I should be much more ready to accord to man that superiority which he claims; but as the facts stand disclosed by the sacred historian, it appears to me that to say the least, there was as much weakness exhibited by Adam as by Eve. They both fell from innocence, and consequently from happiness, but not from equality.”

Sarah Grimké

Letter 1 (July 11, 1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

“Is it not clear that to give to such women as desire it and can devote themselves to literary and scientific pursuits all the advantages enjoyed by men of the same class will lessen essentially the number of thoughtless, idle, vain and frivolous women and thus secure the [sic] society the services of those who now hang as dead weight?”

Sarah Grimké

Written in 1852, as quoted in ch. 87.
The Female Experience (1977)

“It would be as wise to set up an accomplished lawyer to saw wood as a business as to condemn an educated and sensible woman to spend all her time boiling potatoes and patching old garments. Yet this is the lot of many a one who incessantly stitches and boils and bakes, compelled to thrust back out of sight the aspirations which fill her soul.”

Sarah Grimké

Written in 1852, as quoted in ch. 87.
The Female Experience (1977)

“At sixty I look back on a life of deep disappointments, of withered hopes, of unlooked for suffering, of severe discipline. Yet I have sometimes tasted exquisite joy and have found solace for many a woe in the innocence and earnest love of Theodore's children. But for this my life would have little to record of mundane pleasures.”

Sarah Grimké

Letter to Harriot Hunt (1853), as quoted in The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Woman's [sic] Rights and Abolition, p. 241, by Gerda Lerner. Editorial Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 0195106032.

“I do deeply deplore, of the sake of the cause, the prevalent notion, that the clergy must be had, either by persuasion or by bribery. They will not need persuasion or bribery, if their hearts are with us; if they are not, we are better without them. It is idle to suppose that the kingdom of heaven cannot come on earth, without their cooperation.”

Sarah Grimké

The “cause” was two-fold: abolition of slavery and establishment of women’s rights, especially suffrage. Some abolitionists and feminists thought it essential to win the support of clergymen.
Letter 15 (October 20, 1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

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