wisdom saying:  “Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder;” and straightway disposed his opinions and prejudices, his thoughts and purposes in cordial obedience therewith.  He saw at once the immense value of woman’s influence in the temperance movement, he saw no less quickly her importance in the anti-slavery reform, and he had appealed to her for help in the work of both, and she had justified his appeal and proven herself the most devoted of coadjutors.

In the beginning of the movement against slavery the line of demarcation between the sexes was strictly observed in the formation of societies.  The men had theirs, the women theirs.  Each, sexually considered, were very exclusive affairs.  It did not seem to have occurred to the founders of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, or of the national organization to admit women to membership in them, nor did it seem to enter the mind of any woman to prefer a request to be admitted into them.  Anti-slavery women organized themselves into female anti-slavery societies, did their work apart from the men, who plainly regarded themselves as the principals in the contest, and women as their moral seconds.  The first shock, which this arrangement, so accordant with the oak-and-ivy notion of the masculine half of mankind, received, came when representatives of the gentler sex dropped the secondary role assigned women in the conflict, and began to enact that of a star.  The advent of the sisters Grimke upon the anti-slavery stage as public speakers, marked the advent of the idea of women’s rights, of their equality with men in the struggle with slavery.

At the start these ladies delivered their message to women only, but by-and-bye as the fame of their eloquence spread men began to appear among their auditories.  Soon they were thrilling packed halls and meeting-houses in different parts of the country, comprised of men and women.  The lesson which their triumph enforced of women’s fitness to enact the role of principals in the conflict with slavery was not lost upon the sex.  Women went, saw, and conquered their prejudices against the idea of equality; likewise, many men.  The good seed of universal liberty and equality fell into fruitful soil and germinated in due time within the heart of the moral movement against slavery.

The more that Sarah and Angelina Grimke reflected upon the sorry position to which men had assigned women in Church and State the more keenly did they feel its injustice and degradation.  They beat with their revolutionary idea of equality against the iron bars of the cage-like sphere in which they were born, and within which they were doomed to live and die by the law of masculine might.  At heart they were rebels against the foundation principle of masculine supremacy on which society and government rested.  While pleading for the freedom of the slaves, the sense of their own bondage and that of their sisters rose up before them and revealed itself