When human beings are regarded as moral beings, sex, instead of being enthroned upon the summit, administering upon rights and responsibilities, sinks into insignificance and nothingness.
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.
gutenberg.org
Now if rights are founded in the nature of our moral being, then the mere circumstance of sex does not give to man higher rights and responsibilities, than to woman.
These rights may be wrested from the slave, but they cannot be alienated: his title to himself is as perfect now, as is that of Lyman Beecher: it is stamped on his moral being, and is, like it, imperishable.
Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men have the same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights.
Here a great fundamental principle is uplifted and illuminated, and from this central light, rays innumerable stream all around.
I have found the Anti-Slavery cause to be the high school of morals in our land--the school in which human rights are more fully investigated, and better understood and taught, than in any other.
The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own.
If their numbers are counted to swell the number of Representatives in our State and National Legislatures, the very least that can be done is to give them the right of petition in all cases whatsoever; and without any abridgement.
The fact that women are denied the right of voting for members of Congress, is but a poor reason why they should also be deprived of the right of petition.
Art thou afraid to trust the women of this country with discretionary power as to petitioning?
They were not willing to be governed by laws which they had no voice in making; but this is the way in which women are governed in this Republic.
Our fathers waged a bloody conflict with England, because they were taxed without being represented.