Woman Crusader

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6626, 12 August 1931, Page 10

Woman Crusader

Who: ANGELINA GRXMKE. Whe'rc: The United States. When: Nineteenth century. Why famous: An American reformer, a crusader in tho causes of abolition and of woman’s rights. She and her sister Sarah were born in Charleston, S.C., of a wealthy and cultivated family which, as a matter of course, owned slaves, but from the first their sympathies lay with the slaves. Sarah never forgot a rebuke which she once received becauso she had ventured to teach a littlo Negro maid her letters; Angelina used to take every means she could contrive to alleviate the sufferings of the blacks. Leaving the ehurch of her childhood, sho allied herself with the Presbyterians iti the hope that she could rouse them to take up arms on bchalt of the Negro slave. Tailing that, sho realised that she Would find no cooperation in the South. She then left home and set out for Philadelphia where her sister had gone already and where sho had become a member of tho Society of Friends. Angelina, while she worshipped with them and wore their garb, did not stop at that. All the ardour of -her plea for righteous treatment of the blacks she poured out in her “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South,” which the Anti-Slavery Society printed and distributed widely. Copies were burned by a Charleston mob and public sentiment ran so high that it-became impossible for Angelina to visit her family. Then she discovered her powers along another line. Speaking first in (Quaker meetings, she went on to address gatherings of women in private draw-ings-rooms; 1 and interest in what she had ,to say grew until Angelina was appearing in public hails where men as well as women crowded to hear her. Once in Boston her audiences filled a theatre for six successive evenings. She was a distinguished orator, she had beauty of presence and of voice; but, more than all, she was convinced of the justice of her plea. She and her sister were among those possessed of the magnificent courage to break with all convention, brave the wrath of friends and families, free their slaves and give their lives to the cause of human liberty. Both were contributors to the liberal press of their day, Sarah's “Letters on the Condition of Women and the Equality of the Sexes” being usually considered the beginning of file woman’s rights movement in America. Even after Angelina had, in 183 S, become Airs Theodore Dwight Weld, she and her husband and sister opened a school in New Jersey where they welcomed blacks and whites alike.