But to return to the meeting at Lynn.  We are told that the men present listened in amazement.  They were spell-bound, and impatient of the slightest noise which might cause the loss of a word from the speakers.  Another meeting was called for, and held the next evening.  This was crowded to excess, many going away unable to get even standing-room.

“At least one hundred,” Angelina writes, “stood around the doors, and, on the outside of each window, men stood with their heads above the lowered sash.  Very easy speaking indeed.”

But now the opposers of abolitionism, and especially the clergy, began to be alarmed.  It amounted to very little that (to borrow the language of one of the newspapers of the day) “two fanatical women, forgetful of the obligations of a respected name, and indifferent to the feelings of their most worthy kinsmen, the Barnwells and the Rhetts, should, by the novelty of their course, draw to their meetings idle and curious women.”  But it became a different matter when men, the intelligent, respectable and cultivated citizens of every town, began to crowd to hear them, even following them from one place to another, and giving them loud and honest applause.  Then they were adjudged immodest, and their conduct denounced as unwomanly and demoralizing.  Their devotion to principle, the purity of their lives, the justice of the cause they pleaded, the religious stand-point from which they spoke, all were overlooked, and the pitiless scorn of Christian men and women of every sect was poured down upon them.  Nor should we wonder when we remember that, at that time, the Puritan bounds of propriety still hedged in the education and the training of New England women, and limited the views of New England men.  Even many of the abolitionists had first to hear Sarah and Angelina Grimke to be convinced that there was nothing unwomanly in a woman’s raising her voice to plead for those helpless to plead for themselves.  So good a man and so faithful an anti-slavery worker as Samuel J. May confesses that his sense of propriety was a little disturbed at first.  Letters of reproval, admonition, and persuasion, some anonymous, some signed by good conscientious people, came to the sisters frequently.  Clergymen denounced them from their pulpits, especially warning their women members against them.  Municipal corporations refused the use of halls for their meetings, and threats of personal violence came from various quarters.  Friends especially felt outraged.  The New England Yearly Meeting went so far as to advise the closing of meeting-house doors to all anti-slavery lecturers and the disownment the sisters had long expected now became imminent.

We can well imagine how terrible all this must have been to their shrinking, sensitive, and proud spirits.  But their courage never failed, nor was their mighty work for humanity stayed one instant by this storm of indignation and wrath.  Angelina, writing to her dear Jane an account of some of the opposition to them, says: