Grimké Sisters

Angelina & Sarah Grimké

"Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man's wrong, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education." ~Angelina Grimké

The Grimké sisters, Sarah Moore Grimké (1792–1873) and Angelina Emily Grimké (1805–1879), were 19th-century Southern American Quakers, educators and writers who were early advocates of abolitionism and women's rights.

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 Justice of the Supreme Court of South Carolina.

Sarah noted 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. She had wanted to become a lawyer, following in her father's footsteps, and 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. 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.

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 and became early activists in the women's rights movement.

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