The Letters on the Equality of the Sexes were written by Sarah Grimké in 1837. The portrait is of the Artist Siobhan Liddell. She was born in England and lives and works in New York. I met her whilel I was a resident at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. Wikipedia: Sarah Moore Grimke (1792-1873) and Angelina Emily Grimke (1805-1879) known as the Grimké sisters, were 19th-century Southern American Quakers, educators and writers who were early advocates of abolitionism and women's rights. Angelina Grimké married abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld in May 1838, and changed her name to Angelina Grimké Weld. They were born in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. Sarah Moore Grimke was born on November 26, 1792 and Angelina Emily Grimke was born on February 20, 1805. Throughout their lives, they traveled throughout the North, lecturing about their first hand experiences with slavery on their family's plantation. Among the first American women to act publicly in social reform movements, they received abuse and ridicule for their abolitionist activity. They both realized that women would have to create a safe space in the public arena to be effective reformers. They became early activists in the women's rights movement. Judge John Faucheraud Grimké, the father of the Grimké sisters, was a strong advocate of slavery and of the subordination of women. A wealthy planter who held hundreds of slaves, Grimké fathered 14 children with his wife. He served as chief judge of the Supreme Court of South Carolina. Sarah was the eighth child and Angelina was the youngest. Sarah said that at age five, after she saw a slave being whipped, she tried to board a steamer to a place where there was no slavery. Later, in violation of the law, she taught her personal slave to read. Sarah wanted to become a lawyer and follow in her father's footsteps. She studied constantly until her parents learned she intended to go to college with her brother Thomas; subsequently they forbade her to study her brother's books or any language. Her father supposedly remarked that if she "had not been a woman, she would have made the greatest jurist in the land." After her studies were ended, Sarah begged her parents to allow her to become Angelina's godmother. She became part mother and part sister to her much younger sibling, and the two sisters had a close relationship all their lives.Before the Civil War, the sisters discovered that their late brother Henry had had a relationship with Nancy Weston, an enslaved mixed-race woman, after he became a widower. They lived together and had three mixed-race sons: Archibald, Francis and John (who was born a couple of months after their father died). The sisters arranged for the oldest two to come north for education and helped support their nephews: Archibald and Francis J. Grimké. Francis J. Grimké was a Presbyterian minister who graduated from Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) and Princeton Theological Seminary. In December 1878, Francis married Charlotte Forten, a noted educator and author, and had one daughter, Theodora Cornelia, who died as an infant. The daughter of Archibald, Angelina Weld Grimké, (named after her aunt) became a noted poet. When Sarah was nearly 80, to test the 15th Amendment, the sisters attempted to vote. In 1835 Angelina wrote a letter to the editor of William Lloyd Garrison's paper, The Liberator, which he published without her knowledge. Immediately both sisters were rebuked by the Quaker community and sought out by the abolitionist movement. The sisters had to choose: recant and become members in good standing in the Quaker community or actively work to oppose slavery. They chose the latter course. Alice Rossi says that this choice "seemed to free both sisters for a rapidly escalating awareness of the many restrictions upon their lives. Their physical and intellectual energies were soon fully expanded, as though they and their ideas had been suddenly released after a long period of germination." Abolitionist Theodore Weld, later Angelina's husband, trained them to be abolition speakers. Contact with like-minded individuals for the first time in their lives enlivened the sisters. Sarah was rebuked again in 1836 by Quakers when she tried to discuss abolition in a meeting. They were the first female public speakers in the United States. The Grimké sisters first spoke to "parlor meetings" which consisted of women only for this was considered proper. Interested men frequently sneaked into the meetings. The audiences got larger and larger and the Grimké sisters began to speak in front of a mixed audience of both men and women. The Grimké sisters challenged social grounds on two different levels. The sisters spoke for the antislavery movement, at the time there was widespread disapproval of this; many male public speakers of this issue were criticized by the press. The public speaking of the Grimké sisters was also criticized because they were women. A group of ministers composed a letter citing the Bible in reprimanding the sisters for stepping out of the "woman's proper sphere," which was characterized by silence and subordination. They came to understand that women were oppressed and that, without power, women could not address or right the wrongs of society. Such an understanding made these women into ardent feminists. Angelina Grimké wrote her first tract, "Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836)," to encourage southern women to join the abolitionist movement for the sake of white womanhood as well as black slaves. She addressed Southern women in sisterly, reasoning tones. She began with an effort to demonstrate that slavery was contrary to the Declaration of Independence and to the teachings of Christ. She discussed the damage both to slaves and to society. She advocated teaching slaves to read, and freeing any slaves her readers might own. Although legal codes of slave-holding states restricted or prohibited both of these, she urged her readers to ignore wrongful laws and do what was right. "Consequences, my friends, belong no more to you than they did to [the] apostles. Duty is ours and events are God's." She closed by exhorting her readers to "arise and gird yourselves for this great moral conflict." The sisters created more controversy when Sarah published "Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States (1836)" and Angelina republished an "Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States" in 1837. In 1837 they went on a tour of Congregationalist churches in the north east. In addition to denouncing slavery, an acceptable practice in radical circles, the sisters denounced race prejudice. Further, they argued that (white) women had a natural bond with female, black slaves. These last two ideas were extreme even for radical abolitionists. Their public speaking for the abolitionist cause continued to draw criticism, each attack making the Grimké sisters more determined. Responding to an attack by Catharine Beecher on her public speaking, Angelina wrote a series of letters to Beecher, later published with the title "Letters to Catharine Beecher." She staunchly defended the abolitionist cause and her right to publicly speak for that cause. By the end of the year, the sisters were being denounced from Congregationalist pulpits. The following year Sarah responded to the ministers' attacks by writing a series of letters addressed to the President of the abolitionist society which sponsored their speeches. These became known as "Letters on the Equality of the Sexes," in which she defended women's right to the public platform. By 1838, thousands of people flocked to hear their Boston lecture series. In 1839 the sisters edited American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, a collection of newspaper stories from southern papers written by southern newspaper editors. Until 1854, Theodore was often away from home, either on the lecture circuit or in Washington. After that, financial pressures forced him to take up a more lucrative profession. For a time they lived on a farm and operated a boarding school. Many abolitionists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, sent their children to the school. Eventually, it grew to become a cooperative, the Raritan Bay Union. Although the sisters no longer spoke publicly, they remained privately active as both abolitionists and feminists.[citation needed] Neither Sarah nor Angelina initially sought to become feminists, but felt the role was forced onto them. Devoutly religious, these Quaker converts' works are predominantly religious in nature with strong biblical arguments. Indeed, both their abolitionist sentiments and their feminism sprang from deeply held religious convictions. Both Sarah, who eventually emphasized feminism over abolitionism, and Angelina, who remained primarily interested in the abolitionist movement, were powerful writers. They neatly summarized the abolitionist arguments which would eventually lead to the Civil War. Sarah's work addressed, 150 years early, many issues that are familiar to the modern feminist movement. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.