Sarah M. Grimke
Sarah Moore Grimke was born on this date in 1792. She was a white-American abolitionist and advocate of women's rights.
From Charleston, S.C., she came from a distinguished Southern family. On a visit to Philadelphia, Grimke joined the Society of Friends. She converted her younger sister Angelina to the Quaker faith, and the two moved to the North permanently in January 1832. Angelina became an abolitionist in 1835 and, in turn, converted Sarah.
These two timid daughters of an aristocratic slave-holding family became the first women who dared to speak in public for the black slaves and then for women's rights. Sarah wrote An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States in 1836, urging abolition, and Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman, 1838. In 1838, the sisters persuaded their mother to give them, as their share of the family estate, slaves, whom they immediately freed.
Sarah Grimke died in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, on Dec. 23, 1873.
