From Biography in Context: Encyclopedia of World Biography, December 12, 1998
- Born: November 26, 1792 in Charleston, South Carolina, United States
- Died: December 23, 1873 in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, United States
- Other Names: Grimké, Sarah
- Nationality: American
- Occupation: Feminist
Sarah Moore (1792-1873) and Angelina Emily (1805-1879) Grimké were antislavery leaders and early agitators for woman's rights.
Sarah Grimké was born on Nov. 29, 1792, and Angelina Grimké was born on Feb. 20, 1805; their father was a distinguished South Carolina jurist. Partly through the influence of their older brother Thomas, who was prominent in temperance and pacifist reforms, and partly from their own religious beliefs, the sisters early opposed slavery, although the family owned several slaves.
On a trip to Philadelphia in 1819 Sarah was converted to Quakerism and later so was Angelina Grimké. They settled in Philadelphia in the 1820s. The Quakers' passivity failed to satisfy energetic Angelina. After reading William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator , she wrote to him and then wrote a pamphlet, which the abolitionist press eagerly published. Her An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836) urged her Southern sisters to "overthrow this horrible system of oppression and cruelty, licentiousness and wrong." That this was written by a Southern woman made it unusually valuable to the antislavery cause and aroused such disapproval in South Carolina that authorities threatened to prosecute Angelina if she returned.
Sarah Grimké, shyer than her sister, wrote An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States (1836), urging churches to oppose slavery on religious grounds. The sisters freed the slaves they had inherited and offered their services to the Northern abolitionists. "As I left my native state," wrote Angelina, "to escape the sound of the driver's lash and the shrieks of tortured victims, I would gladly bury in oblivion the recollections of those scenes. But it may not, it cannot be."
The Grimké sisters were highly effective in speaking to and organizing women. The American Antislavery Society appointed them lecturers (after much discussion of the propriety of sponsoring women to speak in public), and in 1836-1837 "Carolina's high-souled daughters," as John Greenleaf Whittier named them, toured New York and New England. The prevailing prejudice against women appearing publicly before "promiscuous assemblies," however, led to many objections and brought up the question of women's rights. Sarah's Letters on the Equality of the Sexes(1838) and Angelina's Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States (1837) firmly linked the rights of slaves to the rights of women and helped introduce the divisive "woman question" into the abolitionist movement. Garrison urged them to continue speaking. But Theodore Weld counseled Angelina not to "push your women's rights until human rights have gone ahead."
After Weld and Angelina Grimké were married on May 14, 1838 (they had one son, Charles Stuart), the sisters spent most of their time assisting Weld with his writing and his political work in Washington. When Weld, in poor health, retired from the abolitionist movement in 1843, Sarah accompanied the couple to New York and later helped conduct Weld's interracial school in New Jersey. Sarah died on Dec. 23, 1873, and Angelina on Oct. 26, 1879.
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DARING TO FLY; Blending fact and fiction, the author of The Secret Life of Bees brings to life a girl full of "alien ideas" and the young slave she teaches to read, each becoming a woman who learns to soar
Tampa Bay Times (St. Petersburg, FL), February 16, 2014
Byline: COLETTE BANCROFT; Times Book Editor
In the years before the Civil War, Sarah Grimke and her sister Angelina Grimke Weld were two of the best-known women in America - "modestly famous and extravagantly infamous," as Sue Monk Kidd puts it in her new novel.
Their story was remarkable: Born into the lap of luxury as daughters of a wealthy, aristocratic, slave-owning family in Charleston, S.C., they grew up to become passionate crusaders for abolition and women's rights whose speeches drew crowds of thousands as well as verbal and physical attacks. A pamphlet against slavery they wrote in 1839 with Angelina's husband, Theodore Weld, was a major influence on Harriet Beecher Stowe's world-shaking 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Now, 140 years after Sarah's death, they are largely unknown. But in The Invention of Wings, Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees) imagines them back to life in unforgettable fashion.
As she explains in her author's note, Kidd combines real incidents with fiction in the book. The true event that lies at her story's core is an episode in Sarah's childhood. On her 11th birthday, as was the tradition in her family, she was given a personal slave, a "waiting maid," a girl of about the same age named Hetty Grimke. Sarah taught Hetty to read - in secret, because it was against the law for anyone to teach a slave to read. (Sarah's father, a lawyer and judge, helped write those laws.) They were caught and severely punished.
In real life, Hetty Grimke died not long afterward. In The Invention of Wings she lives, and shares the book with Sarah, each of them narrating, in distinctive voices, alternate chapters that take them from childhood to middle age, and into lives neither of them imagined when they bent together over a slate and book in Sarah's locked bedroom, the keyhole covered.
But don't call her Hetty. "Handful was my basket name. The master and missus, they did all the proper naming, but a mauma would look on her baby laid in its basket and a name would come to her. ... If you got a basket name, you at least had something from your mauma."
Handful she is, from childhood a fierce girl who strains against the mental bonds of slavery. It's a mind-set she gets from her beloved "mauma," Charlotte, and one that often puts both of them in harm's way in the Grimke household.
Sarah's mother, Mary, runs that household not with an iron fist but with a gold-tipped cane that she swings with vigor into the head of any slave who annoys her - with more brutal punishments possible for greater transgressions. Mary is not much kinder to her children, and she is perpetually exasperated with Sarah, who, besides being plain and plagued with a stutter that renders her poor marriage material, is full of "alien ideas. This is our way of life, dear one, make your peace with it," Mary says.
But Sarah cannot. Her earliest memory is her horror at seeing one of the family's slaves whipped, "blooms of red that open like petals" soaking the back of her dress. As a young woman, Sarah reflects at a party, "The slaves moved among us with trays of custard and Huguenot tortes, holding doors, taking coats, stoking fires, moving without being seen, and I thought how odd it was that no one ever spoke of them, how the word slavery was not suitable in polite company, but referred to as the peculiar institution."
Her questioning mind also leads her to resist the belle's path laid out for her and her sisters: appropriate husband, hordes of children (her mother has 11), the endless details of overseeing a grand house and the slaves needed to run it. Sarah wants to be a lawyer like her father, which she discovers is a laughable notion, yet she can't accept her fate. She will have a couple of romances, one a youthful folly, the other a deep love that makes her confront her own desire for independence.
Handful is not much concerned with romance, and Kidd subtly makes clear why. The reality for a slave was that not only was it illegal for her to marry, but anyone she loved - a partner, a parent, a child - could be sold at a master's whim, never to be seen or heard from again. Happily ever after was not a possibility.
For both Sarah and Handful, story is deeply important - knowing the story of the past and telling one's own story. For Sarah story is embodied in books; even as a child, she says, "I dreamed of them in my sleep. I loved them in a way I couldn't fully express. ..." When she is caught teaching Handful to read, her punishment is being banned permanently from her father's huge library. As an adult, as her ideas about abolition and feminism take shape, she expresses them first in writing.
Story takes a different form for Handful. Charlotte is a highly skilled seamstress who spends all her days sewing every article of clothing and household goods for 13 Grimkes and a dozen or so slaves, but at night she sews her own story: a magnificent quilt whose squares are appliqued with pictures, of her with her own mother, of Handful's father, of herself with one leg strapped up behind her and the strap fastened around her neck as one of the missus' punishments. She teaches Handful to sew as well, and one of the first things the girl learns is to copy her mother's decoration of those quilt squares with black triangles that represent the wings the people once had. In Africa, Charlotte, tells her, "they flew like blackbirds. When we came here, we left that magic behind."
It isn't easy, but Handful will invent her own wings, and so will Sarah. And to their engrossing stories, by turns shocking and thrilling and moving, Kidd brings her own kind of magic.
Colette Bancroft can be reached at cbancroft@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8435.
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In An Age Of Slavery, Two Women Fight For Their 'Wings' All Things Considered
Title: In An Age Of Slavery, Two Women Fight For Their 'Wings'
Publication Information
Source: All Things Considered. 2014. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Audio file, Broadcast transcript
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SIEGEL: Sue Monk Kidd, author of the best selling novel "The Secret Life of Bees," takes on both slavery and feminism in her new book. "The Invention of Wings" is a story told by two women. One is a slave, the other her reluctant owner. One strives her whole life to be free. The other rebels against her slave-owning family and becomes a prominent abolitionist and early advocate for women's rights. As NPR's Lynn Neary reports, the story is based on the life of a real historical figure.
NEARY: Sue Monk Kidd grew up in Georgia in the 1950s and '60s. As a white teenager, she watched as the civil rights movement played out around her. These experiences shaped her, she says, and still pull at her as a writer.
KIDD: I think it's part of my history. It's part of who I am. I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and so passionately but race matters to me. Racial equality matters very much to me, as does gender. There's something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me.
NEARY: So when Kidd first heard of Sarah Grimke, she was intrigued. In the years before the Civil War, Grimke and her sister, Angelina, left the comforts of their wealthy family's home in Charleston, South Carolina to travel the country, speaking out against slavery. In doing so, they also had to face stiff opposition to the idea that women had a right to speak out at all on any issue.
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Artemis Literary Sources - Document - In An Age Of Slavery, Two Women Fight For Their 'Wings' 12/8/15, 5:56 PM
KIDD: Gender and race got very entwined in the 19th century as abolition broke out, and then women began to want the right to speak about it. I think it was controversial, even among abolitionists, you know. And the Grimke sisters were told to sort of pipe down. They refused to do that. They said, we could help the slaves so much more if you would give us rights to speak and act.
NEARY: Kidd decided to make Sarah Grimke's story the basis of her novel. But she needed another equally compelling character.
KIDD: I knew from the very beginning that I couldn't tell the story of Sarah Grimke without telling a comparable story in substance to that of an enslaved character. I wanted both worlds to be there. I didn't want it to be just one side, looking at it through one lens.
NEARY: In one of Grimke's journals, Kidd read about a young slave named Hetty who had been given to Grimke as a young girl. Kidd transformed that story into an incident that occurs at the beginning of the novel. The fictional Sarah is presented with a slave as a gift on her 11th birthday, a gift she tries desperately to refuse. Here, Kidd reads from the book.
KIDD: (Reading) I struggled to pry the words from my mouth before she exited. Mother, please, let me - let me give Hetty back to you. Give Hetty back, as if she was mine after all. As if owning people was as natural as breathing. For all my resistance about slavery, I breathed that foul air, too. Your guardianship is legal and binding. Hetty is yours, Sarah. There is nothing to be done about it.
NEARY: Sarah and Hetty's stories are told in alternating chapters. Sarah is trapped by the limitations of her role as the daughter of a socially prominent family. Unable stop the cruelty against slaves which she witnesses, Sarah develops a stutter. She becomes a misfit and social outcast until she begins speaking out against slavery.
Hetty, who is also known as Handful, the name her own mother gave her, finds ways to defy the system that enslaves her. At times, she suffers terribly as a result. Kidd said she did not want Hetty to be seen as a passive victim.
KIDD: We need to understand that so many slaves resisted. They fought. They freed themselves. They escaped. They worked in subversive ways. I mean, it was not a passive, victimized situation all the time.
NEARY: Sarah and Hetty's lives are entwined whether they like it or not. Their feelings for each other are deep and complicated, as Hetty explains at one point in the novel.
KIDD: (Reading) People say love gets fouled by a difference big as ours. I didn't know for sure whether Miss Sarah's feelings came from love or guilt. I didn't know whether mine came from love or a need to be safe. She loved me and pitied me. And I loved her and used her. It was never a simple thing.
NEARY: Kidd says she knew it was important not to romanticize the relationship between Sarah and Hetty.
KIDD: Because it is complicated and it's disfigured by so many things: guilt, estrangement and defiance. And yet, in the midst of all of this disfigurement, they cared about each other. And that's very complicated. Can love really exist in a situation like this? What kind of love? What form of love? What kind of a relationship is really possible when you have this vast injustice between them? And can it find redemption? Can you find your way to some sort of uneasy sisterhood?
NEARY: Kidd says trying to get the relationship between Sarah and Hetty right used to keep her up at night. And when she wrote the last sentence, she burst into tears. She couldn't believe she had actually taken on the subject of slavery and managed to write a book about it. Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.
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Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
"In An Age Of Slavery, Two Women Fight For Their 'Wings'." All Things Considered 8 Jan. 2014. Literature Resource Center. Web. 8 Dec. 2015.
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copy of Angelina’s ‘Appeal to the Christian Women of the South’
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