The Women's Rights Movement: Spirituality and Activism

Sarah Grimke (1792 - 1873) was an abolitionist and a suffragist during the first wave of the women's rights movement. Like many of the other women's rights activists of her time, Sarah Grimke found her beliefs about women's rights to be deeply rooted in her religion and her spirituality. She believed deeply in God and believed that at the heart of the debate over what women should and shouldn't be able to do was the mistranslation and misinterpretation of God's Word in the Bible.

Central to her spiritual beliefs were the ideas that God created man and woman as equals and that nowhere in the scripture was it actually ever written that men and women shouldn't be held to the same standards and allowed the same rights and privileges. In fact, she whole heartedly believed that "woman should move in the sphere allotted for her occupation by the Creator," but "she refused to comply with the male interpretation of its limits and protested against the false translation of scriptural passages which male translators so effectively used to perpetuate and sustain their own position." (Behnke, 26) In effect, Sarah Grimke agreed with the clergy that God was woman's Creator and Lord and that she and all women were servants of God and subject to all the laws and restrictions set forth by God. She also felt, however, that the rules and restrictions imposed exclusively upon women were actually a result of the interpretation of men who had twisted the true intent of the Bible and the words of God in order to subjugate women and prevent them from fulfilling their proper roles, the roles set by God, in society.

It truly was Sarah's strong belief in God and in Christian scripture as well as her intellectual study of Christian scripture that led her to her activism. She began to see that, though many men claimed that the Bible dictated that women remain silent and out of the public sphere, it was actually the interpretation of those men that limited women and restricted them to their homes and away from public life. Once she understood that it was man's wish, not God's wish, that women be treated as creatures inferior to men, she made great strides in sharing that message with women and men alike and became one of the most influential women in the forefront of the early women's rights and women's suffrage movements.