Grimké, Sarah Moore (1792-1873)

US abolitionist and women's rights activist. In 1836 she published her first major work, Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States, in which she attacked the argument that slavery was justified because it was recognized in the Bible. With her sister Angelina Grimké, she became notorious in her native South for her deep involvement in abolitionism. Her insistence on speaking before ‘mixed’ audiences of men and women was also controversial.

The daughter of a slave-owning judge, she was born in Charleston, South Carolina. While visiting Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1819, she was moved by the Quakers' rejection of slavery. She moved to the city in 1821 and became a Quaker. For several years she confined herself to religious and charitable causes, but when her younger sister Angelina joined her in 1829 and went public with her own attacks on slavery in 1835, Sarah spoke out against the Philadelphia Quakers' own discrimination against African Americans. She published Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women in 1838.

After her sister Angelina married the abolitionist Theodore Weld in 1838, Sarah lived with them and followed them on their moves first to New Jersey and then to Massachusetts, where she helped raise their three children.