People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [72]
To see my cousin with a lamp in one hand and a baby in the other, walk upstairs, with ease and grace while, with flowing robes, I pulled myself up with difficulty, lamp and baby out of the question, readily convinced me that there was sore need of a reform in woman’s dress and I promptly donned a similar costume.
Women, after becoming involved in other movements of reform—antislavery, temperance, dress styles, prison conditions—turned, emboldened and experienced, to their own situation. Angelina Grimké, a southern white woman who became a fierce speaker and organizer against slavery, saw that movement leading further:
Let us all first wake up the nation to lift millions of slaves of both sexes from the dust, and turn them into men and then . . . it will be an easy matter to take millions of females from their knees and set them on their feet, or in other words transform them from babies into women.
Margaret Fuller was perhaps the most formidable intellectual among the feminists. Her starting point, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, was the understanding that “there exists in the minds of men a tone of feeling toward woman as toward slaves. . . .” She continued: “We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path open to Woman as freely as to Man.” And: “What woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded. . . .”
There was much to overcome. One of the most popular writers of the mid-nineteenth century, the Reverend John Todd (one of his many best-selling books gave advice to young men on the results of masturbation—“the mind is greatly deteriorated”), commented on the new feminist mode of dress:
Some have tried to become semi-men by putting on the Bloomer dress. Let me tell you in a word why it can never be done. It is this: woman, robed and folded in her long dress, is beautiful. She walks gracefully. . . . If she attempts to run, the charm is gone. . . . Take off the robes, and put on pants, and show the limbs, and grace and mystery are all gone.
In the 1830s, a pastoral letter from the General Association of Ministers of Massachusetts commanded ministers to forbid women to speak from pulpits: “. . . when she assumes the place and tone of man . . . we put ourselves in self-defense against her.”
Sarah Grimké, Angelina’s sister, wrote in response a series of articles, “Letters on the Condition of Women and the Equality of the Sexes”:
During the early part of my life, my lot was cast among the butterflies of the fashionable world; and of this class of women, I am constrained to say, both from experience and observation, that their education is miserably deficient; that they are taught to regard marriage as the one thing needful, the only avenue to distinction. . . .
She said: “I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God has designed us to occupy. . . . To me it is perfectly clear that whatsoever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do.”
Sarah could write with power; Angelina was the firebrand speaker. Once she spoke six nights in a row at the Boston Opera House. To the argument of some well-meaning fellow abolitionists that they should not advocate sexual equality because it was so outrageous to the common mind that it would hurt the campaign for the abolition of slavery, she responded:
We cannot push Abolitionism forward with all our might until we take up the stumbling block out of the road. . . . If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year, and the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the