Grimké sisters
white American female advocates of abolition of slavery and women's rights
The Grimke sisters, Sarah Moore Grimké (1792–1873) and Angelina Emily Grimké (1805–1879), were American writers, educators, and public speakers, best known for their advocacy of abolitionism and women's rights.
Among the first American-born women to engage in public speaking tours, the sisters advocated through speech and writing for the civil rights of African Americans and civil rights for women, emphasizing the interconnectedness of these struggles. Sarah Grimké's pamphlet, The Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, has been called "the first serious discussion of women's rights by an American woman."
The sisters grew up in a slave-owning family in South Carolina and became part of Philadelphia's substantial Quaker society in their twenties. The sisters, along with Angelina's husband, Theodore Dwight Weld, founded a private school in 1848 on their farm in Belleville, New Jersey.
Early life, education, and family
Sarah Moore Grimké and Angelina Grimké Weld were born in Charleston, South Carolina. Sarah and Angelina's father, Judge John Faucheraud Grimké, was an advocate of slavery. He owned several plantations and hundreds of enslaved people. Grimké had 14 children with his wife Mary (née Smith) and at least three children with enslaved women. Three of his children died in infancy. Sarah was his sixth child with Mary, and Angelina was the thirteenth.
The public source identifies “Grimké sisters” as white American female advocates of abolition of slavery and women's rights. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Grimké, sisters and white.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5609270. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1792, 1873, 1805 and 1879.
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This entry incorporates text from “Grimké sisters” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.