"The forgetfulness of sex": devotion and desire in the courtship Letters of Angelina Grimke and Theodore Dwight Weld

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2004 by Robert K. Nelson

In 1837, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, daughters of a South Carolina planter turned abolitionist orators, each penned a series of public letters in which they attacked the rigid distinctions that their culture drew between the masculine and the feminine. In Angelina's "Letters to Catherine Beecher" and Sarah's "Letters on the Equality of the Sexes," each sister argued that contemporary sex roles that characterized white men as political and economic actors in the public sphere while relegating white women to the private sphere of the home amounted to a perversion of God's plan. According to Angelina, notions of manhood gave men "a charter for the exercise of tyranny and selfishness, pride and arrogance, lust and brutal violence." Worse yet, ideals of womanhood "robbed woman of essential rights, the right to think and speak and act on all great moral questions [and] the right to fulfil the great end of her being, as a moral, intellectual and immortal creature." Sarah expressed the same idea: "instead of regarding each other only in the light of immortal creatures," she wrote in the fourth letter of her series, "the mind is fettered by the idea which is early and industriously infused into it, that we must never forget the distinctions between male and female." The sisters called upon their readers to take up the heroic task of forgetting sex, defying the gender imperatives of the culture and instead obeying a higher law by viewing both men and women as spiritual rather than sexed beings. "When human beings are regarded as moral beings," Angelina asserted, "sex, instead of being enthroned upon the summit, administering upon rights and responsibilities, sinks into insignificance and nothingness." In Sarah's words, only when "our intercourse is purified by the forgetfulness of sex" would men and women recognize and fulfill their true roles in the designs of providence. (1)

The Grimkes composed these two series of letters in the middle of a lecturing tour of New England. In the summer of 1837 the sisters began what was to become a yearlong tour, traveling from town to town advocating the abolitionist cause before thousands who came to hear them speak. Women's engagement in this kind of public activism was unprecedented, and the sisters' culturally conservative contemporaries reacted to it with a mixture of disdain and alarm. In a Pastoral Letter issued by the General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts (which Sarah responded to in her later letters) and Catherine Beecher's Essay on Slavery and Abolition, With Reference to the Duty of American Females (which prompted Angelina's series), the Congregationalist clergy and Beecher (herself a daughter of a famed Congregationalist minister, Lyman Beecher) each claimed that a rigid, social hierarchy that placed men above women was part of the divine order. (2) In their responses to these attacks, as many historians have explored, the Grimkes forcefully asserted women's right and sacred duty to exercise a political voice, to transgress the boundaries of woman's sphere and publicly advocate causes that they believe were morally right. (3)

Yet in their letters the sisters' criticism was not limited to women's exclusion from public politics. Equally radical were their critiques of men's and women's private relationships. Hyperbolic notions of gender perverted the most intimate of relationships, the sisters argued, preventing women from being godly wives and mothers. Viewing her as a sexed being rather than as "an intelligent and heaven-born creature," a husband expected his wife to satisfy his sensual appetites rather than attend to his spiritual state. "By flattery, by an appeal to her passions," Sarah contended, "he seeks to gain access to her heart; and when he has gained her affections, he uses her as an instrument of his pleasure--the minister of his temporal comfort." "[I]nstead of being a help meet to man, in the highest, noblest sense of the term, as a companion, a co-worker, an equal," Angelina similarly argued, "she has been a mere appendage of his being, an instrument of his convenience and pleasure, the pretty toy with which he whiled away his leisure moments, or the pet animal whom he humored into playfulness and submission." In their use of the term "pleasure," both of the sisters were alluding to the linkage between sexuality and domination in abolitionist ideology. Not only was sex tainted in its association with a hedonistic South where white planters exercised an appalling power over the bodies of black female slaves, sex was more generally suspect because it led a husband to treat his wife as a slaveholder treated his slave: as an object--"an instrument," a "pretty toy," a "pet animal"--that he controlled and used for his sensual satisfaction rather than regarding her as a spiritual companion. Only by jettisoning the "idea of her being a female," Sarah argued, would a wife be the spiritual partner God had intended her to be in making marriage a sacrament; only then would she truly be a "help-meet"--"a helper like unto himself." (4)