In 1868 the Grimke-Weld trio
served as officers (with Sarah as a vice president) of the Massachusetts Woman
Suffrage Association; two years later Sarah and Angelina led a group of Hyde Park women in unlawful attempts to cast ballots in a
local election. On one occasion the 79-year-old Sarah tramped up and down the
countryside distributing copies of John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women. Her involvement with Massachusetts
suffrage crusaders continued until her death in Hyde Park.
Grimke's contribution to antislavery agitation
was pivotal, not only because of her considerable talent as a writer, speaker,
teacher, and pamphleteer, but also because of her sex, southern nativity, and
uncommon courage. As leaders of the female antislavery movement, Sarah and
Angelina regularly risked physical harm and slander. They were the only women
to brave social custom and charges of "heresy" in the 1837 speaking
tour of New England; with Abigail Kelley, Frances Wright, Maria Stewart, and
several others, Sarah made it possible for later generations of women to occupy
public spaces without fear (as happened on one occasion) of having to run a
gauntlet of jeering men and boys. Sarah's elegant mapping of similarities (and,
occasionally, of differences) between white women in America and
African-American slaves--and especially her insistence that white women learn
to empathize more completely with black women--elevated her to the first rank
of social reformers and Christian-feminist theoreticians. As historian Larry Ceplair put it, Sarah Grimke and her devoted sister were
genuine "revolutionaries" in a land not given to revolutionary
change, "increasingly conscious that they were blazing a public path for
women of courage who had seen a light or heard a voice of truth" (Ceplair, p. xi).
