The overlap between the abolitionist and feminist causes shows us that the feminist were able to use their fight against slavery in order to claim more rights for women. “The women who went on to fight for women’s rights first learned activism in the fight for slaves’ freedom.” Angelina Grimke became the first woman to speak before an American legislative body and she used “a connection between their own political powerlessness and the subjugation of slaves.”
Her sister, Sarah Grimke, used the same tactics. Sarah used the individualist feminist approach of comparing women to slaves in her pamphlet, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837). Sarah observed, “A slave cannot bring suit against his master or any other person, for an injury-his master must bring it.” She compared the Louisiana law to the one about women which says, “If the wife be injured in her person or property, she can bring no action for redress without her husband’s concurrence, and his name as well as her own.”
She also compared the Louisiana law that said that all a slave possesses belongs to his master with a law that said, “A woman’s personal property by marriage becomes absolutely her husband’s which, at his death, he may leave entirely from her.” (ejfi.org)
Stowe, in Uncle Tom Cabin, uses “an essentially domestic plot to highlight the evils of slavery. The pain of slavery came from its abuse of patriarchal authority.” (baas.ac.uk) Stowe condemned slavery because it “threatened the primacy of the family, coming between mother and child and husband and wife.” (baas.ac.uk)
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