Angelica Shirley Carpenter is the author of the new young adult biography Arm in Arm: The Grimké Sisters' Fight for Abolition and Women's Rights. Her other books include Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist. She lives in Fresno, California.
Q: What inspired you to write this biography of the Grimké sisters, Sarah (1792-1873) and Angelina (1805-1879)?
A: It may seem strange, but my life and career as a reader, librarian, and writer have been inspired by the Oz books of L. Frank Baum. I was a childhood Oz fan, like my mother, Jean Shirley. She was a writer and in the 1980s I began writing with her.
In 1992 we published a middle-grade biography, L. Frank Baum: Royal Historian of Oz (Lerner). Research for that book taught us that Frank’s mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was a famous leader in the women’s rights movement from the 1850s to the 1890s.
For years I kept Matilda in the back of my mind as a possible subject and in 2018 I published a young adult biography, Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist (South Dakota Historical Society Press).
Born in 1826, Matilda was a generation younger than the Grimkés. When she was 11, a visiting abolitionist brought a famous pastoral letter to her home near Syracuse.
Written by the Massachusetts General Association of Congregational Ministers and published nationwide, it criticized and shamed women for speaking in public (taking on the role that the Bible had assigned to men) and for speaking of things “which ought not to be named” (like the sexual abuse of enslaved women by white men).
The letter did not mention the Grimké sisters by name, but it was clearly a response to their New England speaking tour, which Matilda also knew about.
In 1881, when Matilda, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony published the first volume of the History of Woman Suffrage, they dedicated it to the memory of Sarah and Angelina Grimké and 17 other leaders who had died. The 879-page book devoted 22 pages to the Grimkés.
After reading about them, I decided to investigate these women who had inspired Matilda and so many others.
Q: How did you research their lives, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: Starting out, I knew the basics: Sarah and Angelina were born around 1800 to a wealthy family in Charleston, South Carolina. Their father made money though the unpaid labor of 300 people enslaved on his plantations and in his homes.
Of 11 Grimké children, only Sarah and Angelina took a stand against slavery. As young adults, they moved to Philadelphia and became Quakers. Then they became abolitionists and then some of the first women ever to speak in public in the United States.
When critics said that as women, they had no right to speak in public, or to offer opinions about slavery or politics, they took up the cause of women’s rights.
After Angelina married abolitionist Theodore Weld (Sarah lived with them), they retired from speaking and began writing and teaching, still working toward equality for all.
So much has been written about the Grimkés—an overwhelming amount. Gerda Lerner wrote the definitive biography. From this and other biographies that I learned where primary source material could be found, in dozens of libraries and historical society collections.
My favorite sources were their letters, many of which were published in 1934. The book that Theodore, Sarah, and Angelina compiled together, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, provided sad details of life under legal slavery.
I read narratives by people who had been enslaved, the sisters’ own publications, and also biographies, autobiographies, and letters of their famous friends. I tracked down newspapers from the time and I tried, as much as possible, to tell the story in the words of people who were actually there. Using these words is what sets my book apart from others.
My last chapter, “A History of the History of the Grimke Sisters,” tells how they have fallen in and out of favor as biographical subjects over the last 150 years.
The surprises came from small, personal details. I loved how they teased each other in letters, Theodore ribbing the sisters about their drab clothes and their “theeing and thouing” and Angelina calling his handwriting “scratchifying.”
Their slang was delightful: When Theodore was house hunting, he wrote to Angelina that it would be hard to find plain furniture. “Everything is so tricked out,” he said, “and covered with carved work or bedizened and gew gawed and gilded and tipt off with variegated colors.”
I was intrigued by how regularly the sisters sought out advice from manuals: what to eat, how to cook, and how to clean a house.
As Angelina had her first child, she read up on how to care for infants. A strict schedule was advised, with many warnings against overfeeding. But baby Charles refused to nap on a timetable and he cried and cried after getting just a few tablespoons of formula at each feeding. His parents thought he had colic.
Luckily, Sarah had cared for many babies, including Angelina (Sarah was 12 years older) and so when her nephew’s parents weren’t around, she let him eat as much as he wanted, and he soon grew plump and happy.
I liked it when Sarah struck out on her own, visiting the chambers of the Supreme Court in Washington, sitting in the chair of the chief justice, and amusing her travel companions by imagining that someday a woman would preside in that place.
Q: How would you describe the relationship between Sarah and Angelina?
A: Loving and mutually supportive, but with the push and pull of a close, sisterly relationship. Their personalities complimented each other.
Sarah liked having specific rules to follow, so that even as an adult she didn’t mind adopting strict, strange-seeming Quaker limitations (like no reading secular publications, no mixing with people from other religions, no putting fur in your bonnet to keep your ears warm).
She helped Angelina, who was bolder and more outspoken, to adjust to these new restraints.
When Sarah went back to visit her family in Charleston, she was sweet and tactful, even when trying to convince them that slavery was evil.
While growing up in Charleston, Angelina aggressively criticized her family over slavery and other issues. After they moved to Philadelphia, as years passed, Angelina began to resist Quaker rules and she gave Sarah the courage to do so, too.
Together they went on to defy many religious rules and even secular laws as they advocated for abolition and women’s rights. Quiet Sarah hated public speaking but enjoyed writing; outgoing Angelina was a fiery orator who often left her audiences in tears. They made a great team.
Q: What do you see as the sisters’ legacy today?
A: Many of the goals they worked toward were accomplished. Slavery was outlawed (13th Amendment to the Constitution). Birthright citizenship made law (the 14th Amendment), but now Republicans want to do away with it.
Sarah and Angelina wanted suffrage for all, but the 15th Amendment extended it only to men, and our country has still not passed an equal rights amendment to include women.
Over the years, women won many rights: to have access to higher education, to work in their chosen professions, to sign contracts and control their own property, to serve on juries and testify in court, to have rights to their children in divorce cases, and to vote. Birth control and abortion became legal, but now both are threatened.
Seeking gangs of male strangers kidnap people of color from city streets and farmers’ fields to lock them in prisons without due process of law would look familiar to the sisters, who fought the Fugitive Slave Act.
Deporting immigrants and even American citizens to foreign countries, as is being done today, would make them think that the American Colonization Society was back in action, sending Black people “back to Africa.”
Methods used by the sisters still work: insisting on social justice, even if that means defying custom, religion, extremely rich men, or the law. They stood up and spoke out for equal rights for all. Their writing on gender equality was foundational.
Their words echo through the years, giving us the historical roots of current political movements. Sarah and Angelina inspired leaders like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who quoted Sarah in her first Supreme Court case, and in two movies made much later about her.
Sarah’s quote, “All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks,” resonated with many activists after the George Floyd murder.
The sisters published in pamphlets and newspapers; today we have social media to spread the same words. They lost their voices from speaking; today we have microphones.
Most importantly, they stuck to their goals; they refused to be intimidated or to stop talking and writing even when it seemed that everyone wanted them to.
Today they are included in biographies, histories, television programs, plays, school curriculums, and museums like the National Women’s History Museum in Seneca Falls. The sisters’ lives and work inspired bestselling author Sue Monk Kidd to write a novel about them, The Invention of Wings.
Their last hometown, the city of Hyde Park, Massachusetts, recently dedicated a bridge to them, saying, “Their places in both the abolition and women’s suffrage movements are long overdue for recognition and restoration to prominence. It is impossible to overemphasize the role they both played in the struggle for justice in both these fields. A bridge, as a symbol of movement and connection, is a fitting way to honor all they worked for.”
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Lerner, my publisher, sent me a helpful eight-page Author-Illustrator Information Packet to use in promoting this book. I’m working my way through it, updating my website, setting up speaking engagements, and commissioning a one-page information sheet.
I’m also working on a PowerPoint about the sisters that will have additional information and pictures that are not in the book and a speech that can be given without AV (I’m trying not to be a boring talking head).
Next I’m planning to write a young adult collective biography of a new group of women I’ve been studying. That’s a two-year project, at least.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: These are hard times for books, especially books for young adults, that tell hard truths. People say it will be good publicity if my book gets banned, but if it does, I will be heartbroken.
I wrote it to deliver a message from the sisters and from me, about the importance of education and the reasons why everyone needs to fight hard to gain and maintain equal rights for all.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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