Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman (1838)

AUTHOR: Grimké, Sarah Moore

KEYWORDS: Abolition, animals, race, slavery

Child, Lydia Maria.

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, revised Deborah Madsen):

Grimké repeatedly makes clear that she believes nonhuman beings to be a class apart, as set out in the Bible, and that women should endeavor to transcend their base animal nature in favor of the spiritual and the intellectual, the same as men. Grimké makes clear that God created man and woman at the same time, and not one from the other, but both in the image of God; “dominion was given to both over every other creature, but not over each other” (4). She argues that although God made woman as man's “help meet,” she was “a companion, in all respects his equal; one who was like himself a free agent, gifted with intellect and endowed with immortality; not a partaker merely of his animal gratifications, but able to enter into all his feelings as a moral and responsible being” (5).

Nevertheless, she also repeatedly draws connections between the lamentable state of women who are treated both as slaves and as animals. Thus she claims in Letter V, “Condition in Asia and Africa," that men have done one of two things with regards to their relation with women: either buy them or dress them up as objects of their fancy. “They have either made slaves of the creatures whom God designed to be their companions and their coadjutors in every moral and intellectual development, or they have dressed them like dolls, and used them as toys to amuse their hours of recreation” (27).  “A Persian woman, under the dominion of the kindest master, is treated much in the same manner as a favorite animal” (35).  “On The Condition of Women in the United States” (Letter VIII) explains that women in the US are generally encouraged to be fashionable, to read light novels, and to be the domestic toy of her husband: “This mode of training necessarily exalts in their view, the animal above the intellectual and spiritual nature, and teaches women to regard themselves as a kind of machinery, necessary to keep the domestic engine in order, but of little value as the intelligent companion of men” (48).

Men’s shameful behavior towards women, she argues, keeps women’s “animal nature” foremost. In Letter IV, “Social Intercourse of the Sexes,” Grimké begins by arguing that all social interactions between men and women are disturbed by the immediate understanding that it is an interaction between two sexes rather than as two similarly immortal beings. Until men stop immediately thinking of women as women, “we can never derive the benefit from each other’s company which is the design of our Creator … Man has inflicted an unspeakable injury upon woman, by holding up to her view her animal nature, and placing in the background her moral and intellectual being” (24). Speaking of women who strive to improve the situation of the poor, destitute, and sinful, Grimké argues that these women are better suited to motherhood and marriage: “Such a woman feels, when she enters upon the marriage relation, that God designed the relation not to debase her to a level with the animal creation, but to increase the happiness and dignity of his creatures” (25-26). In raising her children, this woman “teaches her children … to lose the animal nature of man and woman, in recognition of that immortal mind wherewith Jehovah has blessed and enriched them” (26).

Grimké addresses the fact that women of the labor class are often only paid about half of what men make, even if they do the work to the same degree of skill. Furthermore, the way that female slaves are treated in the United States: being raped, bearing the children of their masters and having them sold, or being beaten, and having no legal recourse because a slave cannot bear testimony in court (unlike in Athens, where they could). In Virginia in 1832, a man testified that, having purchased four women and ten children, “he thought he had obtained a great bargain; for he supposed they were his own property, as were his brood mares’” (52). The supposedly licentious nature of female slaves was considered a moral affront to “a Christian nation, claiming to be the most enlightened upon earth, without calling any particular attention to its existence …” (53).

 

Last updated on June 16th, 2024

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