American political activist, abolitionist, women's rights advocate, and supporter of the women's suffrage movement
1805 CE
to 1879 CE
Angelina Emily Grimké Weld (20 February 1805 – 26 October 1879) is an American political activist, abolitionist, women's rights advocate, and supporter of the women's suffrage movement.
While she is raised a southerner, she spends her entire adult life, by choice, living in the North.
The years of her greatest fame are between 1836, when a letter she sends to William Lloyd Garrison was published in his anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, and May 1838, when she gives a courageous and brilliant speech to abolitionists gathered in Philadelphia, with a hostile crowd throwing stones and shouting just outside the hall.
The essays and speeches she produces in this two-year period are incisive arguments to end slavery and advance women's rights.
Drawing her views from natural rights theory (famously set forth in the Declaration of Independence), the Constitution, and from Christian beliefs in the Bible, as well has her own experience of slavery and racism in the South, she argues for the injustice of denying freedom to any man or woman, and is particularly eloquent on the problem of racial prejudice.
When challenged for speaking in public to mixed audiences of men and women in 1837, she, joined by her sister, fiercely defends women's right to make speeches and more generally be fully political beings.
Grimké marries Theodore Weld, a prominent abolitionist himself, in May 1838.
They live in New Jersey, with Sarah Grimke, raise three children, and support themselves by running two schools, the later located in the Raritan Bay Union utopian community.
After the Civil War ends, the Grimke-Weld household moves to Hyde Park, Massachusetts, where they spend their last years.
It is during this period, that Angelina and Sarah become active in the Massachusetts Women's Suffrage Association.
