Woman was the first transgressor, and the first victim of power.
Angelina Emily Grimké
The Public Record
Angelina Emily Grimké Weld was an American abolitionist, political activist, women's rights advocate, and supporter of the women's suffrage movement. At one point she was the best known, or "most notorious," woman in the country. She and her sister Sarah Moore Grimké were considered the only notable examples of white Southern women abolitionists. The sisters lived together as adults, while Angelina was the wife of abolitionist leader Theodore Dwight Weld.
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It is my solemn conviction, that, until this principle of equality is recognised and embodied in practice, the church can do nothing effectual for the permanent reformation of the world.
I recognize no rights but human rights--I know nothing of men’s rights and women’s rights; for in Christ Jesus, there is neither male nor female.
Measure her rights and duties by the unerring standard of moral being, not by the false weights and measures of a mere circumstance of her human existence, and then the truth will be self-evident, that whatever it is morally right for a…
Instead of Jehovah being her king, her lawgiver, and her judge, she has been taken out of the exalted scale of existence in which He placed her, and subjected to the despotic control of man.
She was created, like him, in the image of God, and crowned with glory and honor; created only a little lower than the angels,--not, as is almost universally assumed, a little lower than man; on her brow, as well as on his, was placed the…
In ‘the poetry of romantic gallantry,’ it is true, she has been called ‘the last best gift of God to man;’ but I believe I speak forth the words of truth and soberness when I affirm, that woman never was given to man.
Woman, instead of being regarded as the equal of man, has uniformly been looked down upon as his inferior, a mere gift to fill up the measure of his happiness.
Thus have all the diversified relations of life been filled with ‘confusion and every evil work.’ This principle has given to man a charter for the exercise of tyranny and selfishness, pride and arrogance, lust and brutal violence.
This regulation of duty by the mere circumstance of sex, rather than by the fundamental principle of moral being, has led to all that multifarious train of evils flowing out of the anti-christian doctrine of masculine and feminine virtues.
Our duties originate, not from difference of sex, but from the diversity of our relations in life, the various gifts and talents committed to our care, and the different eras in which we live.
My doctrine then is, that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do.