Charleston, 1792, to Massachusetts, 1873. She refused the grant, held the claim, and asked for a withdrawal instead of a favor, and she put the whole of it in one sentence in 1838.
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Sarah Moore Grimké was born into a Charleston slaveholding family, the daughter of a judge and planter, and was refused the education her brothers received. She taught her enslaved maid to read in violation of South Carolina law and was punished for it. She wanted to study law and was forbidden. She left for Philadelphia, became a Friend, and her younger sister Angelina followed her.
The two of them spoke publicly against slavery to audiences containing both men and women, which in 1837 was itself the offense, and in July of that year the General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts issued a pastoral letter condemning women's public activism, holding that woman's appropriate duties and influence are unobtrusive and private.
Her answer, published the following year, is the reason she is in this record.
[See THE QUAKERS · PUSHOUT]
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THE SENTENCE
From Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman, 1838, Letter II:
But I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.
Read it clause by clause and every position this work holds is already in it.
I ask no favors refuses the grant. She is not petitioning an authority for a benefit it might confer and might withhold, which is the form that concedes the authority in the act of asking.
I surrender not our claim to equality holds the claim while declining to make it the subject of the request. The claim is not what is being negotiated.
Take their feet from off our necks is the request, and it is a request for cessation rather than for reform. Not a lighter foot. Not a fairer distribution of feet. The withdrawal of an operation currently being performed.
Permit us to stand upright names what is prevented rather than what is lacking. She does not ask to be raised. She asks to be released, because the standing is hers and something is on it.
On that ground which God designed us to occupy is residency, stated as prior. The ground was not conferred, is not owed, and is not at issue. She is the prior resident of a place currently occupied, and she says so in 1838 in the vocabulary of a foot and a neck.
[See CESSATION · RESIDENCY · PRIOR RESIDENT]
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THE FIGURE IS EXACT AND THE WORK OWES IT TO HER
A foot on a neck must be kept there.
It is not a condition, not an inheritance, not a climate, and not an unfortunate set-up that arose. It is a weight held in place by a body that could stand elsewhere, and it requires that the body remain standing there, continuously, for as long as the effect is to persist. The instant the weight is withdrawn nothing has to be built, repaired or granted. She stands, because standing is what she was doing before the weight arrived.
That is the two-cost geometry rendered in one image, a century and a half before this work stated it, and the removal test runs on it without modification: take the foot away and see what collapses. Nothing collapses. She stands up, and the standing costs her nothing and costs him only the trouble of no longer doing what he was doing.
[See THE COST TELL · THE LIMIT]
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SHE READ THE TRANSLATIONS AS TRANSLATIONS
Her second contribution is forensic, and it is the beginning of a line this work stands in.
Against the ministers' appeal to the New Testament she made an argument about who had done the reading. Her answer, in the Letters, runs that women's powers of mind have been crushed as far as man could do it, and their sense of morality impaired by his interpretation of their duties, but that nowhere does God make a distinction between them as moral and intellectual beings.
The distinction she draws is between the text and its interpretation, and she locates the impairment in the second while leaving the first standing. That is the move the whole recovery depends on, and it is why a woman arguing from Scripture against ministers arguing from Scripture is not simply two readings contending. She is claiming that one of the readings has a history, and that the history has hands in it.
Katharine Bushnell would carry the same method into full manuscript scholarship, and the recoveries of teshuqah and kephalē run downstream of a Charleston woman in 1838 saying that the interpretation was his.
[See KATHARINE BUSHNELL · TESHUQAH · KEPHALE]
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AND THE RESPONSE CAME FROM HER OWN SIDE
The pastoral letter was issued by ministers. It was the sisters' abolitionist allies who found their speaking a problem.
The objection was that raising the woman question would cost the antislavery cause its audience: the argument was distracting, the timing was wrong, the priority was the greater wrong, and the effect of insisting would be to divide the movement. Sarah Grimké was told, by people who agreed with her about slavery, that saying this now would damage the thing they both wanted.
Which is the ordinary shape of it, and is why the case belongs here rather than only in a history of reform. The party who names an operation is answered first on timing and only later on merits, and the answer about timing arrives from the people closest to her.
[See DISQUALIFIED TESTIMONY · THE NAMING TRAP]
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She asked for nothing to be given to her. She named a thing being done, identified the party doing it, described what would happen if he stopped, and declined in advance the offer of a favor in place of the withdrawal.
The ministers answered that woman's influence is unobtrusive and private. She answered that the ground was designed for her to stand on and that there was a foot on her neck.
Those two sentences are not on the same subject, which is why the exchange settled nothing, and why hers is the one still being quoted.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
