When Voices Rose: Women, Abolition, and the Breakthrough of 1837

If we had to date the convergence of the women's rights movement with the anti-slavery movement in the United States, 1837 is a strong candidate. Of course, that confluence of 1837 did not come out of nowhere. A number of Black and white women, sometimes allied and sometimes independently, became involved in anti-slavery activism earlier in the 1830s. When their activism took the form of speaking about political matters to large audiences, especially when those audiences were "promiscuous" (that is, mixed-

sex), they broke taboos regarding women's participation in the public sphere and faced virulent criticism for the transgression. Although it had not been their initial purpose, in order to continue their efforts to end the institution of slavery, they had to defend their right as women to assume a public role.

Maria Stewart, a Black Bostonian committed to combating racial and gender prejudice, is the first female speaker known to have addressed a mixed-sex audience in the United States in Boston in 1832. The next year, Philadelphia-based white Quaker Lucretia Mott was among the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), which called for immediate and total emancipation. The national AASS, with William Lloyd Garrison at the helm, in alliance with a number of local women's abolitionist organizations—including the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, among others—undertook campaigns of public persuasion and political action.

At the end of 1836, South Carolina-born sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké attended a public speaker training for aspiring AASS “agents” and gave their first speeches. As the daughters of a wealthy and politically powerful family of slaveholders, their conversion to abolitionism positioned them to make a distinct and irreplaceable contribution to the abolitionist cause. They were the supposed beneficiaries of the slave system, yet passionately opposed its existence. 

This brings us to 1837. In May, Angelina Grimké, Lucretia Mott, Maria Weston Chapman of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, and numerous other women from Massachusetts served as delegates to the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in New York, the first national convention of female anti-slavery activists. Among the resolutions debated at the conference was one stating that women are “moral beings” with the same rights and duties as men, and that each woman should therefore use all the tools at her disposal—"her voice, and her pen, and her purse"—to work toward the end of slavery. Despite some vigorous dissenters, it was adopted. That is to say, a substantial, membership-based organization called for women to take political action in the public sphere. On the heels of the convention, Sarah and Angelina Grimké began an intense and extensive speaking tour of Massachusetts, in which they argued for women's rights as forcefully as they argued for abolition and directly reached a cumulative audience of tens of thousands of women and men. The effect on listeners and those who read newspaper accounts was such that they helped AASS membership more than double between 1837 and 1838, increasing from 100,000 to 250,000 members.

Following the impact of the Grimkés’ tour of Massachusetts and the emphasis they put on women’s rights alongside abolition, by 1840, the anti-slavery movement had split bitterly into more gender-egalitarian and gender-separated wings. Toward the end of the decade, a wave of women's rights conventions began, including the famous regional Seneca Falls convention of 1848 and the first national convention in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850. Most of the organizers and attendees were abolitionist movement veterans. 

Sources

• Berenson, Barbara. 2020. Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement. Charleston, SC: The History Press.

• Greenidge, Kerri K. 2023. The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.

• Sklar, Kathryn Kish. 2000. Women’s Rights Emerges within the Anti-Slavery Movement 1830-1870. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s.