These Congregational ministers were not the only representatives of the lordly sex to whom the idea of women’s equality was repellent.  Anti-slavery brethren, too, were flinging themselves into all postures of self-defence against the dangerous innovation, which the sisters Grimke were letting into the social establishment, by itinerating “in the character of public lecturers and teachers.”  Amos A. Phelps was quite as strongly opposed to women preachers, to women assuming the “place and tone of man as a public reformer,” as Nehemiah Adams himself.  He remonstrated, with them against their continued assumption of the character of public lecturers and teachers, but to no purpose.  Sarah and Angelina were uncompromising, refused to yield one iota of their rights as “moral and responsible beings.”  They firmly declined to make their Quakerism and not their womenhood their warrant for “exercising the rights and performing the duties” of rational and responsible beings, for the sake of quieting tender consciences, like that of Phelps, among the anti-slavery brethren.  They were in earnest and demanded to know “whether there is such a thing as male and female virtues, male and female duties.”  Angelina writes:  “My opinion is that there is no difference, and that this false idea has run the ploughshare of ruin over the whole field of morality.  My idea is that whatever is morally right for a man to do is morally right for a woman to do.  I recognize no rights but human rights....  I am persuaded that woman is not to be, as she has been, a mere second-hand agent in the regeneration of a fallen world, but the acknowledged equal and co-worker with man in this glorious work.”

The debate on the subject threatened for a short season to push the woman’s question to the level of the slavery question.  The contention became acrimonious, and the alienation of friendships was widespread.  John G. Whittier and Theodore D. Weld, who were both avowed believers in the idea of women’s rights, nevertheless, felt that the agitation of the subject, under the circumstances, was a grave blunder.  “No moral enterprise, when prosecuted with ability and any sort of energy, ever failed under heaven,” wrote Weld to Sarah and Angelina, “so long as its conductors pushed the main principle, and did not strike off until they reached the summit level.  On the other hand, every reform that ever foundered in mid-sea, was capsized by one of these gusty side-winds.”  Both Weld and Whittier endeavored to dissuade the sisters from mooting the question of women’s rights at all, and to urge them to devote their voice and pen to the “main principle” exclusively.  But Angelina confesses that “our judgment is not convinced, and we hardly know what to do about it, for we have just as high an opinion of Brother Garrison’s views, and he says ‘go on.’” The influence of Weld and Whittier finally prevailed with “Carolina’s high-souled daughters,” and they refrained from further agitation of the subject of Women’s rights lest they should thereby injure the cause of the slave.