Abstract

Sarah Grimke, feminist activist and abolitionist, was one of the nineteenth century's most prescient feminist thinkers. She was the first American woman to write a coherent feminist argument, and her writings and work championing the emancipation of woman still remain a powerful influence on the rise of feminist consciousness. However, Sarah Grimke has long been given short shrift as a woman of no real historical significance aside from the her association with her sister, abolitionist Angelina Grimke. In The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimke, Gerda Lerner places Sarah's work in the context of the long history of feminist thought, showing that she was indeed a significant feminist figure and clearly ahead of her time. Focusing on Sarah's essays and letters to journals, newspapers, and contemporaries, and including illuminating articles by Lerner herself, Sarah is finally given full credit for her contributions to the feminist and abolitionist movements in pre-Civil War America.As Lerner explains, "That Sarah's work came to us in snippets and fragments, handwritten on paper cut out of a notebook, embedded in the manuscript collection of her brother-in-law, unnoticed and forgotten for over a hundred years is typical of what happened to the intellectual work of women," not indicative of her accomplishments as a major feminist thinker. The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimke not only sheds light on Sarah Grimke as feminist thinker, theorist, and activist, it powerfully accents Gerda Lerner's pioneering efforts in the universal recognition of the feminist consciousness.